


Equinox

by Chromat1cs



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Backstory, Friends to Lovers, Heartbreak, Lucien is A Treasure and deserves the world, M/M, Personal Growth, Prologue, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-04 01:46:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11544864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: The Autumn Court is filled with venomous blood, and Lucien must get himself as far away as possible before it chokes him. His escape brings a measure of welcome solace, but the whipping tails of snakes beneath fallen leaves come from many other corners beyond the northeast. [Prologue; the ~400 years between Lucien's arrival to Spring Court and Feyre's capture at the beginning of ACoTaR]





	1. Golden Green

**Author's Note:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

There is nowhere to go but outward, and so outward I flee.

I’m sick to death of gold and red and crispness, my breath afire like the way we used to burn the fallen leaves that piled too high— _we_ , I say, as if I can ever return. Fuck them all standing. I’m dying from the inside out, so I figure I must run to finish that job myself in the furthest reaches from Autumn.

I will _not_ give them the pleasure.

Snarling tangles of grief and ire and hate and pain and everything in between have overrun my mind, and as I crash blindly through the underbrush I can feel my magic thrashing beneath my skin like the High Fae of the Spring Court. It hurts, and yet nothing could ever hurt me again as much as having to watch the injustice, the utter fucking _mess—_

Spring Court. I feel a thrum of rash decision pulse down my veins and I suppose I’ve decided. If not death, then Sanctuary. If only so I can contemplate a more honorable way to wipe myself away.

I smell the faint promise of roses to the southwest and turn on my heel towards them with a growl of effort I can’t hold back. My vision has blurred uselessly with tears; I trust my legs to know where they must go. I can’t concentrate on anything enough to will myself transported, I’m three-quarters drained by explosive bursts of emotions so raw the beasts from the Mountain would salivate over them. Running it is then, until I either arrive on a High Lord’s doorstep or let my heart burst from the effort.

Branches crack and golden leaves are trampled through my desperate departure, and I hope these woods can feel every shattering splinter under its fingernails like the echoes of my fury.

Nothing will ever be the same. Nothing can grow in my desolation anymore.

I run for hours. The light has shifted ever so slightly, but I know the lack of change is the fault of crossing Courts. Finally I see greenery thinning out, these woods so filled with fresh life it almost stings my senses, and open up to the forefront of the Spring grounds. My exhaustion flows from me like roiling mist as I skid to a stop against high, metal gates entwined with heavy bushels of wildflowers, slamming my shoulder hard against its solidity. Drawing breath here is like sucking in the smoke of a bonfire, stinging and cloying. I try to whet my throat to call out with enough strength to be heard over birdsong and distant, lapping waters. _Should have waited until nightfall, shouldn’t have been so stupid as to leave a traceable track in the daylight…_

“ _Sanctuary_!” The word comes out wild and torn, and I gasp more heady air to cry again; “ _Sanctuary, my Lord!”_

My voice doesn’t sound like my own, too crusted over with agony I had never known until I watched Jesminda die, but it reverberates furiously off of the flat stone facade of the manor behind the gates I’ve begun to slide down as my resolve well and truly begins to crumble. Frantic footsteps are careening closer down the marble steps now, and I catch a glimpse of tree bark skin on a petite female’s face as the gates swing inward with only the slightest song of resistance from their hinges. Even the decay here is sweet. I scrape up the last of my strength to keep from collapsing and only just manage to stay standing.

“I am Lucien Vanserra,” I pant, looking hard into the servant’s wide, dark eyes as she stares from where she stands at the foot of the staircase, “I request—I request Sanctuary with the High Lord Tamlin of the Spring Court in accordance with—“

“ _Lord Tamlin!”_ The servant shouts over her shoulder without taking her eyes from me and immediately shoulders my right arm across her back. She rushes me up the gleaming stairs with surprising strength I would have remarked upon had I the strength left for wit. But all I can focus on above the roar of blood in my ears is seeking audience.

The soaring entrance doors open with a dark, wooden bang and I find myself in the spotless foyer hall of the Spring Court. A distant, buzzing part of my brain reminds me I came here more than once, long ago as a boy, but I shove the materializing memories away in favor of dredging up more phantom strength so I don’t have to face a High Lord leaning half my body weight on a quiet, grim-faced servant.

“Alis, what—Cauldron brimming, _Lucien?_ Is everything alright in Autumn Court?” The High Lord Tamlin appears at the bannister on the upstairs hall high above us, apparently remembering me as well from similar bygone times, and as he descends the curve of the grand staircase with battle-honed precision I want to shout _Yes, everything is wrong, Beron is a murderer and my brothers are adders and I will never be whole again—_ I quiet my raging grief with a toss of my head _No_. Melodrama has no room left in the inn of my despair, so I squeeze my eyes shut while the embarrassing sear of tears begins to spill from my eyes again. I force myself to meet Lord Tamlin’s eyes and reach for nonexistent strength to explain myself.

“My Lord, I have run to seek Sanctuary.” My voice wobbles like a fucking sapling shoot, but I redouble my glare with all the fire in my lungs rerouted behind my eyes, directly into Tamlin’s shocked-still stare. “Lord Beron of Autumn has murdered a lower faerie without cause beyond a blackened heart, and I stand in danger of death myself if I remain there. Grant me the safety of your halls and the protection of your ranks, and my life is indebted to your land as long as my blood runs red.”

I haven’t noticed the sweat on my brow until a bead of it trickles down my temple and into my left eye, stinging there as it mingles its salt with that of my angry tears, yet I continue holding Tamlin’s own eyes for a breathless and silent second. It seems that even the birds outside the open doors have stilled. I vaguely catalogue a handful of other courtiers watching in quiet surprise from the edges of the hall.

“You needn’t ask twice, my hall is yours,” Tamlin finally says, his face intently serious with the formal and binding answer, and I nearly weep anew with gratitude. _An accepted plea, thank the Cauldron._ A pair of High Fae who had followed down the stairs behind him, both strapped thick with bands of weaponry, step forward on an unsaid bid. “You have my protection and my bond—“ The Lord suddenly inhales sharply, feral and alert in the blink of an eye as his pupils dilate instantly. The soldiers that flank him are still as oaks and staring past us back to the entryway. Tamlin breathes a near-inaudible question that frosts my blood: “Have you been followed?”

I hear it too, and a furious second wind floods me like boiling tar. The triple set of footsteps masked to sound like whispering, crumbled leaves, indistinguishable from the forest itself—save for the fact that here, the leaves do not crush like that for their virility.

“I’m so sorry,” I manage to bite out, the tone of it strange in my throat for the mixture of sincerity and distilled rage mixing in my guts.

“Come with me,” Tamlin demands, every inch a High Lord, and I follow immediately back out to the gates despite the screaming protest of the muscles in my spent legs; I had never known grief could make High Fae so weak. Without fanfare, one of Tamlin’s guards with a short braid of black hair and a mud-colored tattoo on his neck hands me an emerald-pommeled sword from the crossed pair on his back. The vengeance in me flares like a sparking candle wick at its perfectly balanced weight in my palm. I grip the leather cords wrapped across the handle hard.

The outside, suffused with sweetened sun despite the burgeoning tension across the grounds, is stock silent. I force myself to look to the foot of the manor steps, and my guts curdle to find my father’s three most cankerous sons lined up like game pieces just outside the flung-wide gates in feigned courtesy. Eris is still absent, as he was from the brutality of the beheading, and a curdled pulse of something that might have been disappointment churns up in me for a moment. I feel the hammering of magic just beneath my skin. _I will end your line where you stand, I will make you beg—_

“Brother!” The eldest of the three calls, and his geniality curls my lips into a snarl. “We had thought we might start our search here. What fun to find you in the first place we looked.”

“You left the wood mightily ruined, it’s abhorrent,” the youngest sneers, and his high voice so often used for singing sounds shrilly metallic now to my ears.

“You aided an unjust murder. I’m surprised you didn’t drag along the entire brood,” I spit, fighting against my every instinct to remain tame. I square myself where I stand, twenty feet from their pageantry just behind the sandy-haired guard to Tamlin’s left, watching with every ounce of my will for any twitch of aggression from their red-haired imprudence.

“I would hardly call it ‘murder’ to clear out a lowborn whore attempting to usurp the lordship,” the middle son scoffs, and as he flicks a fall of his short, wavy hair from his forehead in apparent boredom I almost drive the sword in my hand straight through his chest with a wild throw. The only thing that stops me is Lord Tamlin’s stoic step forward.

“I have been implored to grant Sanctuary,” he says with a voice as even as an untouched pond. “If you’ve come to incite violence, you’re too late. I am bound to protect Lucien with my forces, as one of my own.”

My three brothers all snort with varying degrees of pettiness, and I can hardly keep from screaming with rage.

“What, this sniveling badger?” The youngest says with a hint of dry laughter, before the middle brother steps forward with a carved out scowl that stills the autumnal trio. The other two look wary beneath their arrogance. I clench and unclench the fingers of my free hand ever so slightly, calling magic to my palm like a reigned attack dog.

“This is Autumn Court business, Lord Tamlin,” the middle son hisses. _Lord_ is colored with a particularly thick coat of verbal ashes. “You would be wise to rescind your promise and let us do what we intend with our brother.” And there as well; _brother_ comes out absolutely charred to its bone.

“I do not _rescind_ my oaths,” Tamlin replies, and I’m positive we can all hear the echo of a hurricane dancing on the edges of his remark. There is another beat of tense silence before the youngest red-haired brother suddenly rips his rapier from its scabbard, and then a flurry of ringing steel and warping sound clatters between us all. My breath is high in my throat when it quiets again, and I see a hulking twist-horned beast, a snarling black wolf, and a feline bear crouching tense where Tamlin and his guards had stood seconds before. A corner of my liver tells me I look ridiculous with nothing but a naked sword held at the ready in my hand— _yes, but I also hold fire._

“I didn’t come to do business with stinking fucking beasts!” The eldest brother roars, glaring sideways at the youngest Autumn lordling for breaking their well-faked placidity but brandishing a pair of daggers nonetheless. I grind my jaw until my back teeth sing with compression.

“Good thing we don’t smell like your rank of rotting leaves then,” the wolf to Tamlin’s right growls, low and rocky as his lips curl back from ivory fangs. I recognize him as the one who gave me the sword, with his massive, hackled coat of crow’s black just like his hair. His menacing presence—indeed, all three of these Spring Court changelings—is almost grotesque against the ivy wrapping merrily up the stone bannister behind him. I look from the wolf back to the brothers just in time to see their eyes flood with the anger of wounded pride.

“Let us punish Lucian for his impunity and be gone, and you can look the other way and go couple with the guard dogs,” the youngest brother snarls, the light glinting from the point of his rapier before the blonde beast lashes its tail irritably and bays out a howl of disastrous warning.

“I do not appreciate being disrespected on my grounds,” Tamlin snarls as he takes a step forward with obsidian claws out that chip one of the steps beneath him where they take his weight. I expect the Autumn Court lords to cower, but they remain glowering with hate down the bridges of their noses with bodies tensed to fight if need be. And it starts to look like that need is crawling closer and closer to truth with each hackle raised on the fur of the beasts beside me. I steel myself to push through a terrifyingly sudden re-dawning wall of exhaustion.

“Nor do we appreciate our kin trying to taint our name, soil our title, and drive our Court into the ground,” the eldest brother seethes. He pins me with a stare then, our eyes the same color, a fact I’ve cursed since I was old enough to realize my bothers—half or whole or anything in between, I’ve always known there was no love between Beron and my mother so I wouldn’t be surprised if we all came from different trysts—would hate me until I was dead by their hand or otherwise. A smile suddenly curls my brother’s lips like ice-crusted water. As I grip my loaned sword ever tighter, I wonder distantly how long he had spent practicing that in the mirror.

“Come along, Lucien. Father requires your opinion on whether he should burn,  preserve, or display Jesminda’s head for the rest of the Court.”

Something in me snaps.

When I was young and training my abilities alongside capable alchemists and spellcasters, I was drilled many times about control; how important it was to control my gifts, for they had the power to destroy as well as cleanse— _You must always be sure, Lucien, to steer away from killing with fire. Honorable combat must never leave burns or scars._ My mother had, for a time, favored me and taught me how to fight with words rather than flames. A tongue of words leaves far more concentrated exaction in its wake than a tongue of fire. Words are usually my preferred weapon of choice. But right now, in this moment, surrounded by the perfumed smells of greenery and the cruel reality of the way my father chooses to define his heirs, I don’t want control.

I want justice.

With a bellow that feels like it tears my vocal cords, I throw my open palm forward and let fly the coils of power drawn up between my tendons. My brothers react quickly, but the middle son is fatally, deliciously trapped square in the middle of the wide column of orange and white flames that spiral up from the ground beneath him. Earth flies apart as the roaring inferno splits through grass and clay, and he has barely enough time to try and scream out a counterspell before his body is vaporized with a sickening squelch and hiss of viscera. It takes a lot out of me, too much even, but I can’t let them see that. I can smell the ends of my hair reeking faintly of residual magic and brimstone, but the rest of my senses are monopolized by the sudden, grim present of the other two brothers rushing at us up the steps on swift feet made of fire. Their faces are set with rage. Their blades are drawn like steel teeth.

Tamlin and his guards react before I have a chance to hurtle myself down the steps. A wall of fire that radiates heat like a punch to the face blazes as the younger brother calls out a rankled curse and sweeps a broad arm out in front of him. Tamlin swats through it as if it were nothing but cheesecloth, and I feel a cold shiver chain down my spine. The stairs, pure white upon my harried arrival minutes earlier, are now a scarred skirmish ground of smoldering scorches and violent pockmarks from the changelings’ claws.

“You can’t hide behind springtime, you fucking coward!” The eldest brother is locked in a failed parry with the feline beast, his hair unbound as he yells at me with wild eyes. “You’re a mistake, never meant to be born!” Tamlin’s guard snarls, a lion’s dark and guttering snarl, and presses the force of his teeth around the X of the locked blades in the Autumn lord’s shaking hands. His massive tongue prods at the flats of the steel impatiently. “We’ll all carve you out before you have a chance to destroy the lordship like everything else you touch!”

Jumping back with a modicum of huffing effort, the eldest shrugs off the beast’s lockjaw with a vulgar grunt and looks up from the lower half of the stairs. I still have my sword at the ready, but it has turned out to only be decorative at this point from behind the raw power of Tamlin’s sentinels. The Autumn lord before us is clearly annoyed, and he looks to the right as his brow hardens. I follow his eyes, all of us tense and guarded in the eye of the storm, to see Tamlin flanked by the coal-black wolf with the younger Autumn Court son sprawled on his back, trapped and struggling beneath his massive paw.

“Leave this place,” Tamlin’s earthquake voice commands, but it’s directed to the older brother who has now backed his way down to the grass again, his daggers still crossed in a lethal guard. I look down at the younger brother pinned beneath his claws, the rapier that began the whole bedlam flung several steps down lying useless and bent in half. “If you ever disrespect the law of Sanctuary or come to speak ill of my people in my own Court ever again, the fires you summon will seem like child’s play to the havoc I shall wreak.”

“Don’t you dare!” The youngest suddenly cries wildly, craning his neck back to look at the steady retreat of his older brother. Something in me pangs with sympathy— _no_. That side of me was left to rot when Jesminda’s own body was thrown out for carrion. I cauterized the remains of my ties to the Autumn Court when I immolated my own traitorous, murderous kin.

“Don’t bother showing your face in our Court again,” the older brother calls flatly, his glare pinning me down from afar, finally out through the mouth of Tamlin’s gates and sheathing his daggers without looking at them. My anger quakes anew and I fleetingly calculate whether or not I really _could_ impale him with a hurl of my sword.

“ _NO!”_ The higher voice of the pinned lordling bounces off the marble steps like a flock of songbirds bursting from a tree, and Tamlin shuts his wild terror down with a terse snarl and a crunch of claws. The steps beneath his body bloom redder than his hair; I can’t keep my insides from turning despite the magnitude of my hatred.

“ _Leave. This. Place,_ ” Tamlin repeats slowly, and I can hear the magic building under his voice like a cyclone. The oldest of my kin sneers, spits a gob of blackened blood on the lowest manor step, and disappears in a whipping snap of golden leaves and the distant caw of a raven. The grounds go still. The birdsong bleeds back into presence.

Tamlin shifts back into his body, still staring at the place from which my brother dissipated. “Lucien, I’m sorry you had to be a part of that,” he says simply without looking at me. His guards have shifted out of their massive forms as well and are spelling away cuts and bruises peppered across their skin. I stand, mute and useless, finally letting the force of exhaustion in my knees be felt. I push myself into a sit on the steps and try to ignore the knowledge that there’s a crowd of courtiers staring out through the open entryway. Their eyes bore into my back like pins. _I’m the only accursed foreigner here, I’m the only one with such identifiable hair, maybe I should cut it all off, dye it muddled, change my name—_

“Remind me never to make you angry,” a male’s voice calls from just in front of me. I look up wearily and see the black-haired guard standing two steps below me, grinning faintly through a wince as he presses at his side to heal the deep, pinhole wound of a rapier point. “My name is Andras. You can keep the sword.”


	2. Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Oh for the trees did grow there, plants did spring;  
> Oh for they know a lovers sin  
> Ain’t made of paper or string,  
> It’s cast into a head of stone..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

I sleep for the better part of several days when Lord Tamlin shows me to my quarters. I'm sure there's more to the room than the large, simply-outfitted bed, but a soft place to pass out is the only thing that matters in the moment. 

When I awake for the first time beyond a fitful handful of moments to toss and turn between nightmares or utter, enveloping blackness, a surge of latent emotions crashes through me at once. I’m racked with the tears I wasn't able to finish shedding before fleeing the Autumn Court. My room is quiet with a hazy midmorning scrim of softness, and so the lance of my residual thoughts of violent terror is a shock. Left alone with them, I dissolve. 

I press the heels of my hands over my eyes and let the tears seep down my face and into my hair splayed across the pillow. I no longer feel like I'm precipitous moments away from crumbling to my knees, but my heart feels hollowed out. I've never had to know who I am outside of my Court. I weep for the life I've lost, I weep for the horror of failing Jesminda, and I weep for the simple reason that crying right now feels like a rebirth that I desperately need.

These quarters become a tomb for my mourning for the next eight days. The reality of my loss hits me over and over again like clawing branches—Jesminda is gone. Jesminda is dead. Jesminda is nothing but a memory anymore. If any of the rooms adjacent to mine are privy to the volume of my agony, nobody knocks on my door to demand I stop. I wouldn't have had the energy to stand and answer a call like that anyways. My cheeks are constantly clammy with the tang of bitter tears. 

Each morning upon waking, there is food on my dresser. I wolf it down numbly, not tasting an inch of it but knowing how quickly I could waste away if I don't cram my mouth with nutrients. Even though I feel like nothing more than letting myself turn into a waif and flutter away on the next eastern breeze, I couldn't do that to the Lord who sheltered me without a second thought. It would be exactly what Beron and his calamitous sons would want. I defy their poison by forcing myself to exist through my grief. 

Fresh clothing has been lain out on a dressing rack since I first arrived, but I haven't touched it. I've been twisted up in my sheets for this entire week and a day, cocooned in with the panic of having to learn how to exist without Jesminda, having to fall asleep and see the blood rush down her neck over and over again like a fountain of vulgar rubies. I've had dreams in which I'm the one to cleave out her life, and my watching brothers are all wearing crude masquerade masks of my face. I've woken up screaming for six nights straight. I can't do this for much longer. 

On the eighth morning, waking in a cold sweat and already weeping, I truly catch my reflection for the first time in the long full-length mirror beside the floor-to-ceiling window over which I've drawn heavy shades tight. I tentatively step from my mattress and walk over to the mirror, cringing when my disrepair becomes more apparent from up close. I look halfway to death walking, my hair tangled and lank around a face drawn gaunt from misery. I look like a wraith. My hair may as well be some sort of shroud. 

The faint warble of a bird, muffled through glass, sounds through the window to my right. Without thinking, I tip up an edge of the window dressing and recoil immediately from the sear of buttery sunlight that slashes in through the opening. But the glimpse of greenery, of life, is like a sudden salve on every shattered shard in me. I squint my eyes and push aside the entire curtain, my breath catching to find that my room looks out on thick, flowering gardens woven deep with delicate pruning, woven branches, and carefully-cut soil beds. The closest Autumn Court ever came to this beauty were its arboretums, but one could never see the patchwork of color and blooming like this. _Gardens_. Jesminda had always tended her flowers like children, and I remember in a rush all the hours spent helping her coax life into little autumn seeds. When she had smiled down at budding life—that was when I had loved her most. 

I stand for longer than my weakened legs should have, palms braced against the glass as I weep cleansing tears rather than those that felt like burning salt over the last eight days, drinking in the sprawl of these gardens like antidote. I would never be able to touch her or hear her voice or smell the perfume in her hair again, but I could sew Jesminda's memory among the flowers of this Court like dandelion seeds on wind. She will not have died in vain. I will see the Spring Court become resilient, greener and fairer than any in Prythian for her. I must grow strong. 

I look to the clothing rack for the first time since I first noticed it five days ago. A dark green dressing gown, lined with copper-colored thread and thoroughly masculine, is draped beside a pair of white linen trousers and a soft shirt to go alongside. I feel a deep gratitude for fresh clothing completely lacking orange, red, or purple. 

Before I have a chance to shed the livery in which I'd spent my mourning—battle-worn and stained with stale forest chaff and sweat—I look to the massive porcelain tub in the corner set on a flat expanse of tiles. Its water filled to the perfect depth is dawn-clear, and I walk to its lip carefully before plunging my hands in to warm it with the first glimmer of magic I’ve thought to use since arriving. I climb into the water as if it can wash away the days of bullshit and fuckery; it doesn't, but it loosens the muscles in my lower back that have tightened like petulant fists. 

I soak in the water for far too long, heating it again with a twist of my fingers when it goes lukewarm several times, but I don't care. Nobody is waiting on me. Nobody is expecting me to do anything any time soon, as far as I can tell. I wonder for the first time if Sanctuary has a law for my end of the bond—I should speak with Lord Tamlin. I extricate myself from the bath after washing my hair and making sure I don't have any accursed reddened leaves left in it like gripping little talons, crumbling them to ashes with finality. A quick coat of thin magic sees me dry in less than a second. When I put the fresh clothes on, they feel like a pleasant breeze.

The dressing gown is a comfortable weight that makes me feel cared-for after spending so long in nothing but stuffy sheets and sodden clothes. It feels like the warmth I knew before I came of lording age and left my mother's favor to enter the fray of fraught brotherhood back home. _Home_. I should probably stop assigning that to Autumn Court. This is my home now, where the greenery smells too sweet and the light kisses my skin with a gentleness I don't think I've ever known. 

Lost in my thoughts, I spark instantly to embarrassed attention when I smack into somebody rounding the corner. I step back, flustered and frantic to address the faerie with dignity. 

"Ah! Tamlin has housed you in the barracks, looks like he sees need for a flame-throwing unit," Andras says with a lopsided grin, and I notice from my backed away vantage that he's terribly sweaty beneath full-body, shining leather armor.

"I haven't had a chance to speak with him yet," I reply, my middling vocal register feeling thin opposite the elmish bends of Andras' baritone. "I'm on my way to find him, to thank him. And—possibly find breakfast.”

"Lunch," Andras corrects me, and I fight back more prideful embarrassment rising in my cheeks. "And unless you're trying to find food on the training grounds, I would suggest taking a right out of your quarters instead of a left.”

"Thank you," I mutter, tossing out a quick bow before my about-face is stopped by Andras barking out a bright laugh. 

"You don't have to bow at me, Lucien Vanserra—“

" _Do not_ call me by my blasted fucking surname," I blurt, shocking myself and him with the immediacy of the demand. I shrink back, unconsciously wrapping the dressing gown tighter about my waist. "I would prefer not to be lumped in with the cancerous rot I managed to escape," I say with conciliatory softness. 

"I should say so; you don't seem as downright fucking horrible as those three we faced the other day at all." Andras shows no signs of being taken aback as he nods at me. Another small smile twitches onto his mouth. "I'm good at reading people.”

"Thank you," I say again. The air between us goes thick with my waffling lack of surety mixing with Andras' easy confidence. “I—have a lovely afternoon." I catch myself halfway through another automatic bow and turn around quickly to make my way down the hallways stretching behind me where Andras had gestured. His low, good-natured chuckle is not lost on me over the sound of my bare footsteps on polished stone. I abjectly ignore the faster beating of my heart for the overdose of uncharacteristic awkwardness I just dumped through it. After eight days of nothing but weeping and reminiscing, I’m in dire need of brushing up my social graces.

I suppose I've reached some sort of dining hall when I step through a high archway to see ranks of guards and courtiers and servants seated together at long tables with seasonal food laid out in front of them—the ceiling yawns up at least forty feet above it all, everything in this Court is so _tall_. I don't know where to go from here, each row of tables is essentially full up. A couple courtiers look at me and mutter what I can only guess is gossip between one another, cutting their eyes sideways at me. It isn't particularly malicious at all, just badly-covered surreptitiousness. I hold up my chin defiantly despite the feeling of wanting to sink into the floor. I spy Lord Tamlin at the far end of the hall, and before I can start towards him he sees me and strides over with purpose. 

"Lucien," he says by way of greeting, holding out a hand in a bid to walk alongside him, "I'm glad you're well. You have much more color to you."

"Thank you, my Lord, for the lodging, I—“

"Sanctuary is sacred," he says simply, as if it's the most natural truth in the world. He stops walking as he turns to me. "And please, call me Tamlin."

"Thank you, Tamlin," I amend. He smiles at me, broad and kind, and I wonder how on earth he can rule a Court of this size with such a gentle heart before I remember the hulking power of his changeling form. I stay my eyes from flicking down to his knuckles.  

"If you'll follow me, I have a small request. Could we speak in my study?" Tamlin asks. He's already moving again, not needing my affirmative, down a new turn in the hallway, and I trail several inches behind him. My stomach growls again, and I sincerely hope Tamlin doesn't hear it. Food can wait a bit longer. 

The study we arrive in less than a minute later is, unsurprisingly, high-ceilinged. Tamlin props himself into a lean on a massive marble desk at the center of the room, which makes it feel like a sort of auxiliary throne room. It's nearly an altar, save for the stacks of parchment and maps lain across its expanse. I remain standing, and I feel very much like a subject before Lord Tamlin's feet. I would feel like prostrating myself, were it not for the ease with which Tamlin was sitting back on the desk. 

"As you know, Prythian is large," he says. I wait for him to continue, but he keeps watching me with those forest eyes. He watches with intrigue, almost mirth, rather than bald scrutiny. I square my shoulders slightly to draw up my own confidence as far as possible and nod.

"Yes, my L—Tamlin. Too large, if you ask my shit siblings."

Tamlin laughs like the arc of a waterfall and nods. "Yes, I suppose any power-hungry brat would think that." His punctuating smile is one of camaraderie, and I return it honestly. "I would like to do a better job of communicating the state and needs of Spring Court to the rest of this large place, but many of my capable ranks are...less versed in more delicate social concepts. You've spent your life around all sorts of people and situations, am I correct in assuming?"

"I've attended enough pointless fetes to last a lifetime," I reply with a sneer I can't hold back; Cauldron cracked, I fucking hate parties thrown for nothing but the flaunting of wealth. Tamlin chuckles again, more reigned in as he seems to be ready to make a point. I clench my jaw, wondering why in— _oh shit, he can't mean—_

"Lucien, I request your services as Emissary of the Spring Court." His voice is even, wise, and sure as he says it. My tongue dries up. I can't say no, he offered me Sanctuary; there isn't any law about doing a sheltering Lord's bidding, but it would be nothing short of heartless to reject the offer. But thinking about leaving the safety of these walls makes my stomach turn. The possibility of running into one of my brothers on the outskirts of someone else's lands makes my head spin. 

I'm taking far too long to answer, and Tamlin notices. "I promise I wouldn't send you out green. You'd have training in our style of combat with my best quartermasters, and my dearest courtiers would get you up to speed on the social politics of this Court." His eyes soften as he pauses and takes in my discomfort. "We'll train you in proper dueling as well as more...permanent solutions. I'll keep you armed and safe, Lucien. You're a member of my Court now. This is your home."

Hearing it from his own mouth, _Home_ , pours a rush of emotion through me. I feel my eyes prickle with tears, but I swallow hard to keep them at bay and cling to some sense of dignity. He's already seen me exhausted and weeping, muddied, unhinged—I would like to preserve just one damned ounce of emissary-worthy grace for more than a day at a time. The acceptance and trust that Tamlin is willing to place on me shakes my foundations and stirs the thought that perhaps I'm not as useless as my family has always told me. I bow my head. 

"It would be my honor," I announce, and I'm glad for the strength that curls itself around my voice. When I look up again, tears pushed back to the annals of my senses where I plan on keeping them sealed for a long, long time, Tamlin looks proud. 

"Welcome to the Spring Court, Lucien."


	3. Red Virgin Soil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The commander, Andras? Ahh. Wolf of the Southern Rim. Get that bastard drunk enough and he'll either fight you or sing at you. One of the underlings was far past ripped one night, said he thinks The Wolf sounds like a cello when he gets going. ...Could you...not mention that I called him a bastard?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

I've been practicing my dancing and bowing with a quick-footed lower faerie and her assistants in the east ballroom every day for three months since Tamlin appointed me as Emissary. I've gotten very good at twirling a partner around with just enough speed to be in time but not dizzy them, but a steadily-growing itch at the conjunction of my shoulders has been craving something different. Back in Autumn Court, I would practice my swordplay at least four times a week. I haven't so much as touched a hilt since my arrival and the brawl on the manor steps. I can tell it's getting to me. The thrice-weekly training sessions with the ancient Spring quartermasters are mostly just theory. It’s maddening.

"Work on your balance, Lucien," one of the dancing faeries instructs as I take off my dress shoes in favor of bare feet to return to my quarters after a particularly long session of bends and dips and complicated stepping patterns.

"Won't I just be pleasantly intoxicated when I use all of this in Court?" I quip, rebuffing the faerie's replying scowl with a genial grin. 

"Balance," she repeats sternly before I step out to round the corner to the staircase that will take me to the barracks wing. I roll my shoulders once, dwelling on the invisible spur to action from my neglected athletic streak, thinking perhaps to do a set of exercises in my room before sleeping a bit later—

"Hail, Lucien!" Andras' voice calls from the far end of the hallway, his hand raised in greeting when I look up at the sound. He's outfitted in a linen training shirt and the lower half of his leather armor, the intimidating breastplate and arm straps tucked against his waist under his elbow. Andras and I had shared meals together over the past several weeks, trading stories and pleasantries. He was born in Spring Court, raised from the start to be a finely-honed weapon for the Lord. I hadn't had the chance to see him in full action since the fight with the Autumn Court sons, but I could tell immediately just by the way he carried himself through the barracks mixed with the memories of his changeling size that he’s absolutely lethal. Some of the other sentinels told me early on that Andras has held his position as Tamlin's lead commander for a full century.

I raise a hand as well, and both of us continue walking forward until we're facing each other to the side of the hall. Andras nods at the shoes in my hand, a ridiculous-looking foil to the armor in his own. "Practicing how to sweep everyone off their feet and bow to the Spring Court?" He jokes, and I let myself laugh. Andras' deprecating humor is new to me, something nobody in Autumn Court ever had time for. It's one of the most refreshing things about my new life. 

"If I'm sent out at this point, I could get a courtier halfway through a traditional pattern and eating from my palm, but the second half would see them with bruised feet and refusal to ever do business with us again," I reply, and Andras laughs in return.

"You'll get there, chin up," he continues to tease, "I would offer to be a practice partner but I've two left feet without a sword or two in hand."

"I'm sure the Night Court would love you, I hear waltzing while armed to the teeth is the norm for them along with bathing in blood." That makes him laugh again, and the timbre of it makes me smile. I eye the armor at his side and the scabbards crossed on his back before he notices me cataloguing his gear and jerks his chin over my shoulder toward the training grounds. 

"I'm bound for my own brand of dancing, care to join? If you aren't too exhausted from your leaps and turns and fluttering things," Andras asks as he flashes me a wolfish smile. My insides stutter and I wonder inwardly if the changeling forms of the Spring Court find their basis in inherent personality traits. Something at the base of my spine cries out for a violent spar, something so far beyond the slow shifts through Spring stances and the hardened, creaking voices of thousand-year-old warmasters. Something _wild_.

"Let me change out of all these...tassels," I say, waving the flowing sleeves of my practice finery tunic vaguely to mask the excitement simmering just under my blood. "I'll meet you there."

We grin at one another, an energy of eagerness leaping up between us as we continue in our separate directions down the hall. I find myself moving quickly when I reach my quarters, shucking the silk dress robes in a haphazard pool across my bed and shuffling quickly into a simple shirt and a pair of trouser that keeps everything a bit more trussed up. I pull on boots of well-worn leather, lace them quickly to halfway up my calves, and I take up the sword haphazardly gifted to me on my arrival. It’s nestled now in a sheathe that Andras had given me the month after so I could actually bring it to lessons without stalking through the halls with it drawn. I strap it across my shoulder and turn to leave the room again once it's secured, braiding my hair back out of my face as I walk. My veins are humming excitedly; I haven't properly faught in what feels like ages. I had figured I would ask Tamlin for a change once I had the theory of Spring Court combat it under my belt, desperate not offend the tradition of this place; this is a welcome one. 

The hall to the training grounds is fairly empty tonight beyond a couple bustling servants, and when I reach the grounds themselves I find the wide packed dirt arena occupied only by Andras stretching out beside a bench next to a sword rack. 

"Now you look ready for a proper bout!" He calls, jumping up and down in place and shaking his forearms out lightly to loosen up his limbs. I finish making my way to his end of the circle and catch the way he notices the glittering pommel sticking out above my shoulder. "And you bring the bite of my old friend with you—ohhh, this will be fun."

He rolls his shoulders back, having strapped himself with the rest of the leather armor before I arrived. The embossed breastplate is decorated flush with curling ivy that tessellates down thick buckled straps to polished arm bracers and lobstered finger guards that make his hands flex with towering strength. Andras' entire body seems to radiate power. I step back, joints already warmed up from my dancing, and gesture to the open expanse of the training arena.

"After you," I bid with a calculated measure of challenge. Andras smirks and makes his way to the center of the circle as I follow.

"Rules:" he barks, drawing two short-swords from his back in a slow, ringing arc. "No fighting dirty—no teeth, no magic, no jewel-shots. No striking with intent to maim. When one of us gets what would be a fatal hit, we reset and go again. Would you like to keep score?"

"Whatever suits you best," I reply, readying my own blade in an Autumnal stance that should have felt out of place but makes my muscles hum with readiness. Andras grins at me and I don't ignore the fact that it makes my belly contract pleasantly. 

"We'll keep score. Ready?" He slides his feet into a low, easy crouch that bristles his swords like fangs. Perhaps he fights like a wolf in his own body too. I tighten the grip on my sword and lick my lips, trying to chase away the streak of nervousness I feel flash through my lungs. 

"Ready."

Andras pushes from the balls of his feet like a striking serpent, and I bring my blade up to parry in a whirling pattern of arms and waist that glances his blow off to my right. We meet with clashing accuracy in spinning, tight pirouettes, tracing the outer rim of the arena in steady progression as we test one another's angles. Andras moves like wind, his intensity ebbing and flowing above a constant thrum from his core in battering flashes of tight, lethal action. I do my best to counter it with what I learned to survive—parry, twist, jab for the hip, strike down for the shoulder guard—and we end up squared as perfect opposites after a solid four minutes of flurried swords. 

Suddenly, I hear the way the dirt grinds unevenly beneath Andras' left foot when he leans back to absorb a strike. His preparation into the next launching attack is thrown off-kilter, and I see the opening on his right side flail unguarded for a fraction of a second. I spring forward, my center of gravity low, and drive my shoulder into his chest where I would have planted my sword to the hilt had this been a true battle. He raises his arms in surrender, and we remain pressed close for a moment. As I pant to catch my breath, face so near his waist, I smell Andras' scent of woodland musk and polished leather. 

"Again," Andras commands excitedly, and I feel his voice rumble in his chest against my upper arm. We step apart and I will my hammering heart to stay itself for another square off as we return to the center of the arena. We set our stances again, and Andras has a feral set to his gaze when we lock eyes from our readied positions. His smile is barely-reigned glee. 

“Set!" I shout, and we throw ourselves into the fray again. After two minutes of more exactly even railing on one another, Andras lets a laugh burst from him in the middle of a swing that I deflect with a scraping sweep of my sword. 

"You fight like a warrior!" He cries, giddy, over the reverberation of our clamoring weapons. I rebuff another one of his swings and spring back fluidly to avoid a sneaky upward slash from his non-dominant hand. 

"It helps to be constantly hunted by your brothers," I reply, grunting with the effort of a broad turn to hit at Andras' back thigh that he blocks with a quick, armored forearm. "Necessity breeds talent, you know."

"We have combat trials every solstice to reorder the lineup of the guard," Andras says, his raised voice easy despite the compound effort I know is involved with the complexity of slashes he throws at me—I recognize it as something similar to a duplicitous volley my youngest brother used to try every time we were pitted against one another, and I just manage to hit away the final strike that doubled back in a blow aimed at my knees. Andras' eyes flash, and an impressed huff of breath escapes him as his nostrils flare when we meet eyes for a half-second of suspended action. "I win _every season_."

I run at him despite the gloat, his arrogance lighting my guts like a stream of quicksilver, and flurry my sword with a dive that would have lain him prone if he hadn't guessed the trajectory and thrown up another savage block with his blades in a cross. Our locked stare is now pure challenge, electrified across the expanse of dirt and sweat and steel between us like a channel of magic. We both try for several more slams of victory, but we beat one another back every time. 

Ten minutes, fifteen minutes onward; I can feel my shirt sticking to my back, and I think for the first time that it could possibly count as unfair for Andras to be armored against my essential lack of cover. The fleeting thought causes _me_ to be the misstep this time, opening my flank with a poorly-judged drop of my elbow that Andras catches like a scent. He lunges forward into it, his body crossing mine with furious purpose, but I fling my arms wide and arch backwards to avoid the flat of his right-hand blade. 

I suck in a breath when I feel the momentum keep going, _shit_ , the force loosing my sword from my fingers like a stone from a sling. It clatters across the dirt floor in a muted, scraping retreat, and I have just enough time in the half-life of a gasp to recalculate my movements for unarmed defense. 

I slam my back to the ground and throw my hands up, just in time to catch Andras by the wrists as he moves to stab his swords into the dirt on either side of my neck. I let a short little yell, half venting exhaustion and half adrenal high, rip itself from my throat, and Andras replies with a silvery snarl when I clench down on the pressure points on the undersides of his forearms and throw his weight to my right. As I suspected, my grip causes him to drop his blades to the ground as well. I immediately reroute my thoughts to scrapping with our fists and feet.  

Andras is quick to shift his style as well; I suppose one doesn't remain at the right hand of his High Lord solstice after solstice for nothing. He tries to throw my balance off by kicking my legs to the side, and I buck against the throttle of his mass. _Fucking shattering wrath_ , Andras is all muscle, hewn like polished granite and grappling with me like his life hangs in the balance. By instinctual counts, I suppose it technically does.

I can't help crying out when he flips me over in one fluid switch of his weight. My chest hits the dust and my cheek grits against it, rich and earthy, and I can feel the strain of my shoulders keening slightly where Andras has my arms bundled in a neat and vicious hold behind my back. My breath heaves in deep gulps. I can hear Andras panting as well, and the damp heat of the room amplifies when he leans down next to my upturned ear and digs his knee up slightly to make my back strain again—not painful, but hard evidence of who Andras thinks deserves bragging rights. 

" _My_ win, now we're even," Andras murmurs darkly, lighting an embarrassing rush of arousal through the pit of my stomach. 

"This isn't lethal," I insist into the ground, turning my eyes up as far as they can see through my periphery to watch Andras grin through his heady closeness. He says nothing, but I feel the undeniable and cheeky twist of a dagger pointed at my left kidney. I swallow thickly, cursing my negligent catalogue of his arsenal and my inability to shake this ridiculously sudden attraction that makes the dagger seem like a cat’s toy all at once. "Reset. Best of three." My voice is slightly hoarse, and I hope Andras doesn't notice. 

He springs from my back in one movement, freeing me with a silent song of release from my back muscles. I stand slowly and brush the dirt from my sweat-tacked shirt and trousers, trudging to the center of the room without meeting Andras' eyes directly. I taste faint blood on the inside of my cheek and spit to the ground. 

"Sorry," Andras offers, already from his place at our starting pit. I wave a hand in dismissal. 

"Comes with the territory." I notice he hasn't picked up his swords again and raise an eyebrow as I settle into a low martial stance. "Unarmed, then?"

"Unarmed," Andras replies, and the slow crawl of his smile is possessive; hungry for victory, conquest, and pride. I am determined to turn that upside down on him. 

"Set!"

We leap at one another like beasts, myself quick as a fox against Andras' lupine fury. My assumption in his first move is correct, and I throw my arms around his waist as my tackle hits home with a solid thud to his midsection. We hit the ground hard, but he seems not to notice as he twists and launches me off with his feet. My arms are wrenched off of him, and I go skidding across the floor. 

Scrambling to my feet again, I have just enough time to rebuff a wide, sailing arm chop from Andras with a heavy shrug. It's an active effort not to let the magic crawl out of my pores and lend me advantage, but I refuse to stoop to shady tactics—especially since it seems that Andras doesn't use more than the basic soldier's kit of healing magic I'd seen after our fight with the Autumn Lords. Who would need to with this much raw skill? I lash out and feel my braced palms connect in a satisfying smack with Andras' chest, and he staggers before I hook my arm across his shoulders and roll forward to bring him tumbling after me.

We hit the ground again and I hear the breath rush out of Andras, giving me the opening I need to throw myself on top of him and brace an arm just shy of the tender crook of his esophagus. But I realize too late that he had faked the sound of disadvantage—the smile I see before he seizes my collar and heaves me backwards is all teeth. It thrills me. 

I flail out for purchase before my back hits the ground again, and my foot hooks Andras' leg like a vaulting pole. Our disparate swinging trajectories collide in midair and cancel each other out, so our bodies end up tangling briefly before coming to a heavy, thudding stop. We both lie on our sides, facing one another, breath coming deep and rapid. Andras' hands are still locked on the front of my shirt. My right knee has the inside of his left leg pinned savagely. Stalemate. 

"Fuck," Andras says under his breath, his yellow eyes wide and locked on mine. His hair has come out of its short tail and is sticking to his face and neck in tousled chaos. His skin is flushed with effort. I bodily steer my thoughts away from how a change in scenery would shift the purpose of this image completely, not wanting to deal with the implication of what my curiosity in exploring that might do to my place in Court. I'm sure I look just as thoroughly worked-over anyways, and a certain twist to the light in Andras' eyes as they flicker over me tells me that isn't necessarily a bad thing. 

"Draw," I say solidly, laughing loud and bright when Andras grinds a fistful of dirt into my shoulder to shatter the enigmatic tension between us as quickly as it came.

"Draw," he replies when I quit wriggling, and it sounds like an invitation to challenge that score every chance we get. I'm intrigued, eager, and standing on the edge of happiness for the first time in years.


	4. Mary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "In my house the silence rings so loud  
> Under doorways, through the hallway; down.  
> Waiting for the secret to grow out,  
> What we do when no one is around..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

My first several on-site assignments as Tamlin's Emissary come and go with no casualties to speak of, thank the Mother. Summer Court dealings over luncheons filled with platters of fish and salt-rimed pleasantries; a week of Dawn Court breakfast feasts in the clouds; Winter Court games at Solstice rife with sporting duels in the snow and a holly-crowned winner—I went out in the quarterfinals of the third round of swordplay, and spent the rest of the festivities between my meetings daydreaming idly of dark-haired, wolfish power competing for his own spot back at the Spring Court.

I’m traveling now more than I ever dreamed before, and I believe it’s doing wonders for my general temperament. Tamlin is thoroughly impressed and endlessly thankful for my skills. His Court are warriors. I am borne from a bed of snakes. I’ve become the perfect figurehead to bring his hand in politics back with the force it needs, although I’ve not yet been summoned to the Autumn Court. I have a feeling that will come, a dread and sorrowful feeling, but I don't let myself worry on it too much. 

It takes nearly an entire year since my arrival for Tamlin to open up about his lack of confidence in ruling. All of Prythian knows of the slaughter of his family, but it hurts to hear the details directly from the destitute son himself. He opens up one day as the rest of the manor is preparing for Nynsar, in his study with the windows opened wide on the gardens. 

"Nynsar was my mother's favorite," he says softly, without preamble, as I gather up a stack of correspondence we had just drafted to Day Court, Summer Court, Night Court—I blame this shock of memories on the icy edict, dictated by Tamlin and twisted by my own hand into something a bit more civil, written to Night Court for their pilgrims to quit vandalizing shrines in our forests on their way across borders on threat of swift retaliation.

I pause with the letters in the crook of my arm and slowly sit back down, inviting him to keep speaking. I know how poisonous the plague of dead memories can feel, and I will him to continue without saying anything. As a son who saw his mother as my own haven from what I was too young to construe as the certain death of my brothers, my well of empathy ripples. 

"She was an incredible courtier, you know. She would have liked you. And she would have been envious of your hair." Tamlin's sad smile strikes my soul like a bell hammer before I notice a muscle in his jaw twinge and he stands suddenly to stalk across the study. I can sense the movement of the horned beast inside him rippling the study’s gentle breeze like a low growl.

"I've been trying to do this on my own for thirty years, Lucien," he says quickly, "I don't feel like I'm making any difference at all."

"What do you mean?" I put the letters down on the chair, weigh them down with a river stone I take from Tamlin's desk, and stand to face the High Lord. I leave the space between us, but I meet his eyes seriously. Thirty years is understandable; even the smallest changes take at least a year to settle in Prythian and would be nothing compared to a sudden and complete shift in High Lords. 

“I—I don't know how to rule. I know how to be a fine captain, hell and ashes, I would give _anything_ to go back to soldiering, but how do I make my people happy, Lucien? I hardly know who I am anymore."

The silence between us begs for an answer. "I...that's a very complicated concept, Tamlin, you know that."

"I know, and I'm afraid I'm going to run the Court to rubble with my inability to grasp it." He groans, a fist of blonde hair gathered at his temple, and for the first time I see the frustrated, petulant youth beneath his surface that was never allowed to be worked out of his system before taking on too many things at once.

"Tamlin," I say clearly, feeling my own mother's tendency to embolden rise up in me like a tide. The High Lord stills and stares at me with desperation in his eyes. "You're allowed to mourn if you need to. But your people need to see your warrior face regardless of the circumstances. You're a High Lord, and a fine one. Don't let doubt cloud that. Don't worry about trying to shoulder my job; that's what I'm here for. Spring will never fall if I have anything to do with it."

For a horrifying moment, I think Tamlin might cry. But he draws himself up and returns to the desk, sitting heavily in his high-backed chair. "Thank you," he whispers, and a smile twitches at the corner of his lips. "I wish you hadn't had to flee your old home, but I'm endlessly grateful you chose to land here."

"You and me both," I reply, and we share a comfortable silence of gratitude. 

"Are you looking forward to your first Nynsar?" He asks me after a deep and steadying breath, gesturing to the open window through which the smell of perfectly perfumed flowers is floating. I got mostly used to the constant fragrance of Spring Court after the first few months of being here, but the influx of fresh sweetness is almost overwhelming lately with all the new gardening. I gather the letters up from the chair as I sigh genially, intent on sending them off with doves for delivery or bringing them along for quick trips of my own once the festivities close after tomorrow. 

"I am," I reply, making to leave the study with a chuckle to myself. "Cut the prettiest flower, gift it to the prettiest maiden? Talk all you will of the heft of your responsibilities, but tonight's role should be easy even for _you_."

"Something like that. Your confidence in me is staggering, Lucien," Tamlin snorts with humor, and I leave him in a much cheerier place. 

—

Later in the day, my regular bout with Andras is a welcome distraction from my conversation with Tamlin and the general frantic action to prepare for the festival tomorrow. Andras and I have continued to meet four nights a week to spar. My dance lessons are the perfect warmup, and I find myself being able to bring agility from each discipline into the other with advantageous results. I glean Spring Court wildness from the way I feel his retaliation ring through my limbs, and as the months stretch onward, I sense subtle tastes of Autumn in his strikes that he's absorbed from countering me.

"Hold! My win!" Andras cries when he wrenches me back in a brutal headlock. His sword whispers at my side like a dangerous twist of flirtation, just barely scraping a downward draw to my hip over the fresh leather armor I'd purchased custom six months ago for formal duels with a Solstice advance.

"This armor is doing me more detriment than anything, I haven't won in weeks," I growl, rolling my neck benignly once Andras releases me. He chuckles as he sheaths his blades and unstraps his breastplate, slapping dirt from it shortly. 

"This is hardly the heavier shit too, remind me never to put you on our front lines in _full_ armor." Andras smirks as he teases me, and I throw a rude twist of fingers at him with a good-natured snort. Unstrapping my own armor and shrugging the arm straps off like tangled branches, I let myself watch the muscles in Andras' back shift beneath his linen shirt as he moves to the armor rack to hang his gear. 

"This will be your first Nynsar, won’t it?" He calls to me without looking, busy with buckling his armor to the rack on the arena wall beside ranks of others. I keep mine in my room—it feels a touch blasphemous to keep this relatively delicate dueling armor in the same place as soldier armor that looms massive and, by turns, fearsome with its embossment. 

"Indeed it is. I plan on lingering in the back of everything so I don't accidentally curse every blossom, bud, and petal with a misstep."

“Ah, you don’t give yourself enough credit. Just don’t trample on the flowers and you’ll be fine. Besides, things at least sort of bloomed in Autumn court, didn’t they? Not as barren as Winter, I’m sure.” Andras looks over at me as he shakes a hand through his dark hair— _it’s getting longer these days_ —and seems to notice the bolt of unease the mention of my home jags into my core. His eyes soften. “Sorry, don’t want you dredging up bad memories—”

“There are some flowers that only bloom in Autumn, you’re right,” I interrupt him over the heat of my pulse high on my neck. I ground myself by focusing on our eye contact, locked into those bright, yellow eyes like a deep, rushing creek. “I’ve always been fond of quince. I used to braid it into my hair when I was a boy.”

Andras draws out some of my ill feelings like sucking out venom when he laughs, throws back his head, throat limned with sweat but exposed like a sigh as the sound rings briefly through the arena. “Of course you did, I can’t say I’m surprised,” he sallies, and I kick dirt at him as if to say _thank you, you dolt._

We part ways as we leave the arena, our quarters at separate ends of the same wing in the barracks. I hang my armor on the wooden shoulder form next to the mirror, take a cursory bath, and fall into easy sleep. My dreams are dark, watched over by a hue of gold from wolfish eyes, and leave no room for terror.

—

Nynsar dawns, and the last-minute preparations emanate across the grounds like the scent of endless clouds of flowers. I don’t see even a hint of Tamlin or Andras the entire morning amidst the excited chaos, so I’m content to wander a bit aimlessly and enjoy seeing garlands and decorated pavilions go up like tiny cities. The festival, one of the servants prattles to me as I help her carry armfuls of hydrangeas across the gardens and into a wide amphitheater to the west, would take place on the hour between noon and sunset.

The field in which we arrive, and where I promptly lose track of the nervous little lower faerie within the oceans of blossoms, is set for what looks like a stage play. At its center, a patch of dark fertile land encircled by golden petals bears a thick sprig of scilla flowers. A strange and ancient energy thrums through my veins when I look at it—this will certainly be something. I bite down hard on the nerves clattering around in the pit of my stomach. The memories of Jesminda’s gardens are still raw when I touch at them sometimes.

When the sun begins arcing down the latter half of noon, I amble back to my quarters in the hope to look like I maybe fit in with the rest of the Court. I allow myself several extra minutes after a wash to weft my hair up into a twist that, while still simple, echoes a bit more formality than the variations of daily half-ups or braids I cycle through. The tunic I pick from the slim closet by my door is a soft green, and I pair it easily with a pair of ubiquitous white linen trousers and my jeweled Emissary belt. The dagger is for rank and show, at least I hope—one would assume the gentle festival of cutting flowers avoids prize fights, but I can never be too sure in Tamlin’s Court. With the cuffs of my trousers tucked into low boots and tunic cinched loosely at my waist, save for the blazing copper of my hair I look the absolute picture of Spring.

A warning trumpet in the rounded drone of a warrior’s horn signals the ceremony starting soon, so I take one last tug on the fall of my sleeve and leave my quarters at a fast clip. Still nobody left in the halls of the barracks. The only people in the foyer are moving in the same direction as I. Once I get into the gardens and follow the path I remember from aiding the servant earlier, the stream of courtiers is merrily thick.

The sun is three-quarters low in the sky and casting brilliant shadows by the time I arrive at the amphitheater, and my breath leaves my body in a stunned whoosh when I see its full magnificence now. Tables lain thick with food and drink stretch along the outskirts of the wood just behind the stage. Standing in a strong half-circle around the patch of soil, talking happily amongst themselves, Tamlin and his top-ranked guards are furled out like a fan of pure strength with the High Lord at its apex. Tamlin is bare-chested, wearing a crown twisted through with roses. His body is traced with whorls of traditional warpaint along his shoulders and the height of his cheekbones, and ranks are outfitted with sparse and beautiful festival armor that mimics the shapes on Tamlin’s skin in the weave of its straps. They all have flowers woven into their hair. Andras, directly to Tamlin’s right, has a burst of purple hyacinths fitted into the fold of a braid like his own diadem. He looks just as naturally regal as his Lord.

I find a seat on the graduated stretches of stone benches that wrap around the downward hillside beside my dancing instructor and a cluster of border scouts, and within several minutes another horn blast sounds with a more musical cadence. An eager shout goes up, dies down, and goes dead silent as the focus falls to Tamlin. I remember fleetingly our conversation from yesterday afternoon, and a measure of pride fills me to see Tamlin step forward in the picture of commanding confidence and resplendence. If it’s an act, it’s a good one; he’s putting on his warrior face for his people.

Tamlin gives a brief but heartened speech about the fortitude of their Court and the resilience of the spirit in their flowers. “We were made perennial,” he says in a resonant voice as the address closes, and I can smell the magic rolling from his words to make them hit harder, stick in the memory for longer, “and so again and again shall we burst through the frosts of hardship and forge on forever. To the return of the First Flowers, and to the Spring Court!”

With his final words he draws the ceremonial dagger at his hip. Another ripple of cheers goes through the crowd as he crouches at the circle of soil, and I see him murmur what looks like a soft prayer at the ground and press it with a reverent hand. He touches the blade to the stalk of the scilla flowers, slices cleanly, holds up the demure little blossom, and hands it to a beautiful golden-haired High Fae sitting at the edge of the stage as a wild cheer erupts from the crowd. The female accepts the flower gracefully and the male sitting to her side bows low, his head nearly touching the ground, and I realize Tamlin hasn’t claimed a female for himself but has blessed a mating bond instead. My pride swells in earnest, and I add my own whooping shouts to the fray of excitement.

Soon after the gifting of the first blossom, the crowd has broken apart to partake in feasting and dancing through the swaths of flowers in the hours left before sunset. I munch idly on perfectly-cooked meats and pastries, knowing there will be plenty of wine to come once the daylight fades, and mill through the celebrating crowds in happy observance. I’m content to float on my own, for I know Tamlin is mired in an audience of courtiers dancing with him and bidding him to take a song or two on the fiddle between rounds. _This is how you rule,_ I’ll tell him tomorrow when we meet in his study, _you’ve been doing it all along and will continue as long as you live._ I’ve still no sign of Andras, but I’m sure I’ll at least get to compliment his choice of flowers if we can steal five minutes—

“I’ve noticed a disappointing lack of quince around here,” I suddenly hear over my shoulder, and when I turn I’m taken by the presence of Andras’ splendor from up close. He has delicately-detailed swirls of his own ceremonial paint across his face climbing like ivy up from the tattoo on his neck that I couldn’t see from far away in my seat. The festival armor from so near smells of maple and shines like dark opal from the way it’s been reverently oiled, and even the handles of his decorative swords—twice the size of the blades he wields when we spar—rise above his shoulders like glittering pennants. I feel almost delicate in front of him, and I nearly say so before I look down at his outstretched hand and am silenced by a rushing flood of mixed emotions.

The bundle of red quince in his palm is an invitation that opens my insides like a cracking shell. I won’t cry—I locked away my tears on arrival here, I promised myself I would never let them fall in this Court again—but I choke on my words all the same. The last time I gave myself the simple pleasure of putting flowers in my hair was so long ago, before my brothers would spring destruction on me at every turn, before I knew the horror of watching a piece of my heart die with Jesminda, before I had to rebuild my identity on flowers and bramble instead of golden leaves and ashes. The last gift I had given Jesminda was a pouch of quince seeds. She planted them the day before she was killed. There isn’t anyone there to tend them anymore, the seeds are probably dead in the ground, left all alone and locked dormant until they turn to dust—

I hope against all hopes that nobody can see the eruption of so many feelings behind my eyes, as there are still revelers surrounding us. My breath tightens. I feel like I want to reach blindly for my dagger, and I don’t for the life of me know why.

I don’t meet Andras’ gaze, so he continues happily; “Would you like me to put them in your hair for you? I can line them along the braid you twisted—”

“Come into the wood with me,” I manage to blurt, taking him by the wrist and pulling him along hastily. I drop the tart in my other hand to the grass, my sweet tooth forgotten in the need to parse through this onslaught of old thoughts under the simplicity of a shaded forest canopy with nothing but Andras’ eyes to still me again like a beacon.

I beeline through the twittering greenery with Andras following obediently behind me, and only when the hum of celebration has dulled to a distant buzz on the same level as the fat honeybees and the whisper of wind in branches do I stop in a little clearing and turn to Andras. When I meet his eyes I see sympathetic confusion and don’t even know what to say.

“You—the hyacinths were a very good choice for your complexion,” I stammer, not wanting to explain the need for my departure and hoping he’ll take up the mantle of talking and leave me to slump against a tree and calm myself. Perhaps he’ll leave the wood; he probably has ceremonial duties I’ve pulled him away from, _Mother risen_ , I didn’t want to ruin the festival and I might have just done that. I stare at the forest floor and will myself to suck in slowing breaths through my nose.

“Lucien,” Andras murmurs. I focus on the little crimson pods of petals still held gently in his hand, rounded at their edges and curling the way my mother’s hair used to fall over her shoulder. _Breathe, Lucien, in and out_. “I didn’t mean to upset you, I just wanted you to feel like part of Nynsar, and you said these were your favorite—”

“I _would_ like you to put them in my hair. Please,” I say softly over the roar of my own pulse. Andras falls silent as I turn away to a small patch of grass in the clearing, sitting straight-backed with my legs cross in front of me. My heart is still hammering madly.

Andras says nothing, but I hear his footsteps through the grasses coming near before he sits down behind me. I hear the clink and rustle of him unbuckling his scabbards and armor followed by the soft thud of the gear being placed on the ground to our left. He sighs almost inaudibly and I almost turn around to apologize for being so ridiculous, but I feel his hands on my hair and the old, old feeling of flowers sliding into my braids, and I let myself close my eyes and just exist in this moment.

It’s quietly amazing to me that Andras’ battle-worn fingertips can feel so gentle as the rows of quince weave into the twists of my hair. If I concentrate, I can feel the same tenderness in his touch that I could feel in Jesminda’s whenever she would braid my hair or bind pretty things into it; the thought doesn’t sadden me, but instead calms me. My heart has slowed back to its steady beating and I’m breathing evenly again, smelling the woods and the flowers and Andras sitting so near. I was teased sometimes in Autumn Court for the feminine tendency of enjoying flowers in my hair, for my mother’s favor, but here it seems, if the plume of hyacinths in Andras’ hair and the flower crowns on the other guards are anything to go by, that adorning oneself with any kind of greenery is a sign of fierce Court loyalty and warrior’s strength.

“Thank you,” I find myself saying without meaning to. It comes out tenderly. I’m not upset by it.

“My pleasure,” Andras murmurs back. “Here, face me so I can finish the front.”

I keep my eyes closed as I turn around, opting to sit back on my heels instead of re-crossing my legs when I feel Andras reach up to my temples and fit sprigs of the honey-scented flowers there. One of his fingers brushes the shell of my ear and it lights a tiny, ambiguous ember inside me.

“Done,” he says in a matter of minutes, and I open my eyes to see him close-up, smiling, his hands held palms up and open to show that all the flowers are now in my hair. 

“I’ll trust it looks nice, you don't need to hold up a mirror for me like a maiden fitting a dress,” I joke, and I feel a bit more like myself—calmed since the strained episode of flight earlier. Centered. Andras chuckles to himself, and I suddenly notice the removal of his armor has left him shirtless. I hope the rise of heat in my face isn’t visibly evident.

“You look well and truly from Spring Court now,” he muses, his smile pleased, as he reaches forward to adjust one of the flowers at the nape of my neck. I pay subtle attention to the cords of his neck beneath his tattoo and the ceremonial paint on his skin, and I think back to how long it’s been since I looked at another male this way. It was certainly before Jesminda, but it was certainly something that happened more than once. I’d kissed plenty of merchants’ sons, dallied with a few fresh soldiers in the Autumn ranks who had liked that the pretty young son of the High Lord carried on as he pleased. A number of females in between the stronger-bodied males as well, but—but not since I had fallen head over heart for Jesminda. I think for the first time that maybe it wouldn’t be foolish to carve myself open for someone again, someone who can fight me just as ardently as he can calm me with a wreath of flowers in my hair.

“Thank you,” I say again, little more than a whisper, my eyes tracing Andras’ collarbone where it runs sharp like sandstone against the tan of his skin. I stay myself from reaching out to touch it and look up to meet his gaze, seeing there in the shining gold the same thrumming purpose I can feel in my core.

“ _We were made perennial_ ,” Andras says, reaching up to touch his thumb to my bottom lip with fondness as he repeats Tamlin’s words for the earth so gently that they feel like an oath into my softest inner reaches, “ _and so again and again shall we burst through the frosts of hardship_.”

When he kisses me, it tastes like sunset.


	5. Trojan Horses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Gardens grow in my eyes,  
> Oh why do they?
> 
> Seek what I seek in a blinding flash;  
> These bare bones are made of glass.
> 
> In shapes like these, they run softly..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

Three centuries pass, and I feel reborn. I become a stronger iteration of Lucien, filled with the surety and wit that comes from year after year of revisiting my innermost sanctums of self and twisting ever so slightly each time towards the shining destination of contentment. Tamlin is beloved by our Court; Andras is beyond beloved by me and grows moreso with each year spent in every corner of my heart.

Politics have mounted to terrifying heights on the edges of other Courts, especially with the whisperings of Hybern’s commander Amarantha sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. Tamlin does his best to keep us all out of it, but I’ve seen the way she looks at him whenever they have to show up for high dealings somewhere at the same time—she’s starving for him like a crocodile without teeth, and I try not to think of how dangerous her bite can still be. The festering disparity between their affections is from a time even before the war. The missives we send Under the Mountain are terse and business only. Whenever I can, I burn her replies so that Tamlin won’t destroy any furniture with rage at how insufferably inane and suggestive they are.

I’ve just returned from a frustrating week in sanctified neutral land with a contingent of the Autumn Court. Beron has served me nothing but refusals to budge at every turn, especially where our borders are concerned, but at least I saw neither hide nor hair of my siblings and only caught wary glances from two redhaired courtiers this time. Much better than the three days’ assignment a decade ago, in which I was thrown into duel after snide duel with my brothers and was almost crippled by a slipping jab from Eris. Luckily, Andras’ skills have knit themselves deep into my limbs. I’d held my own, to their very loudly-voiced chagrin, but came home so on-edge that I could only bid Andras to fuck me until I couldn’t speak and then do it again.

Still bundled in a frustrated rage, I push open the manor doors in the same movement that sees my forest-green mantle shrugged off and draped over my arm. Alis is tending a new batch of hydrangeas in wide-mouthed urns on each end of the staircase, and she smiles a greeting at me.

“On a hunt?” she asks cheerfully, and I manage a snort that comes out with far too much sharpness than should be directed at dear Alis.

“Had I been allowed to impale Lord Beron’s head on a pike, than yes,” I seethe, and I see the little wood-skinned woman recoil slightly. I sigh, holding out a hand to beg forgiveness. “Apologies. Autumn Court can fuck off,” I amend.

“Lord Tamlin very purposefully avoids sending you to into their Court proper, you know. Many of the less-qualified scouts go in your stead,” Alis sniffs, drawing a groan from me.

“I know, I know, we’ve been over this for years, Alis.” Indeed, she never lets me forget how much of my existence I owe to Tamlin’s friendship.

“My Lord’s in his study,” Alis says over her shoulder as she wipes her hands off together and turns back to the gallery quarters. “He’s been waiting for you to return for the past few hours.”

I clench my jaw—I had been looking forward to nothing but sparring my frustration out with Andras before taking him up for a long bath, but Tamlin waiting on anyone for longer than thirty minutes means something more important than getting my nerves sated.

I whisk my way up the stairs and stalk into Tamlin's study, and I can tell by the way he glares up at me immediately from under a knitted brow that this isn't going to be good. 

"What, Tam," I demand. 

"Read this fucking drivel," Tamlin snaps in response, whipping a folded letter at me through the air with a flick of his fingers. I catch it before it smacks me in the forehead and try not to let my seething show any more than it already is. I almost don't notice the fact that the broken seal is the blood red wax and teardrop sigil of Amarantha's correspondence. My hands don't still, but I can feel the hum of fire beneath my fingerprints. 

_Tamlin,  
_ _It does so sadden me to hear that your busy schedule does not permit you to accompany me on a hunt Under the Mountain any time soon. I assure you, the prey would be exquisite and so well tailored to your inner beast.  
_ _If it suits you, I would have you invited to my court on the next full moon to partake in an evening in your honor. Feasting, dancing, and all other sorts of nighttime diversions would be to your liking._

_I am, if nothing else, at your pleasure._

_Yours,  
_ _Amarantha_

"She didn't even use your title, fuck that," I say shortly. 

"I'd rather vehemently _not_ ," Tamlin growls, and the dark glower in his face has enough gravity to make me snort out a laugh. 

"We'll send back a letter of our own, worded just as prettily, telling her between the lines in no small way to put her jagged quim on ice and never speak to us again," I say flippantly, holding out the letter from Under the Mountain to Tamlin with an eyebrow raised. He waves a hand dismissively before I let a leap of flames wolf it down to cinders between my fingers in a flash. 

"We've been rebuffing her with letters for forty years," Tamlin says in a low voice, not meeting my eyes. "I need you to go before the moon waxes and make it clear that we do not—“

"Oh for Cauldron's sake, I JUST—“

"Lucien, this is not a request, this is a direct order—“

"Fuck off, Tam—“

" _Excuse_ me? I—“

"You heard me!"

"No, I don't, in fact, think that I did! What was that you've demanded so callously of your High Lord, Lucien Vanserra?" 

I bristle when Tamlin spits out my full name, but I shut up. He's standing now, staring me down with his magic bare and blinding, knowing how deeply he's aimed to cut with that verbal weapon; he's desperate. I soften my own stare as I clench my jaw instead of my fists. 

"Sorry," I mutter, and Tamlin sits while the magic clears out and makes it easier to breathe again. I remain standing at the domed center of the study. "When do you need me to go?"

"Before the full moon, within enough time to be cordial."

I feel my anger come bubbling back to the surface. "Why bother with cordiality at all? Being cordial is my entire job description, and even _I'm_ loathe to offer her a fucking inch of it," I snarl. 

"Have you seen her armies, Lucien?" Tamlin whirls on me like a cornered basilisk. "She has rank after damnable rank of creatures who will go berserk at so much as a flutter of Amarantha's eyelashes. I will _not_ give her cause to unleash that kind of force on my Court just because we buy into her fucking politicking. You go within four days or I will winnow you there myself, do you understand me?"

I feel my cheeks burn. The urge to tell him to just go and reject her advances point-blank is readied on my tongue like a ballista, but I swallow the bitter bolt because even I understand that Tamlin can't risk stooping to Amarantha's whims. To have him in her hall is exactly what she wants. "Understood," I grate out. 

"Good. Prepare, pack, dress, do whatever you need. Four days, Lucien." His tone is warning, my frown is deep, and I'm not imagining the crackle of splintering wood that sounds as I turn on my heel and leave the study—I’ve seen it before. Tamlin's gripped his chair back so hard it smashes between his fingers. 

Still seething distantly, I check the training grounds first for Andras. Several new recruits are sparring loudly, their shouts and laughter bouncing off the high marble walls, and I only raise a hand in greeting when they acknowledge me enthusiastically before I circle back out to the hall and stalk down to Andras' quarters. My own room has been moved to the second floor, with more furniture and a richer color scheme for no longer being tucked into the barracks. It's done wonders to groom my ego but has made me long for my early years here when I could sidle into Andras' room in the dead of night in a matter of twenty-seven quiet steps. Now, more than ever.

I hammer twice on his door with a closed fist, waiting a couple seconds before a jet of impatience shocks my guts and spurs me to pound on the glossed wood three more times. I'm drawing breath to summon him by name at the seam of the door when it swings open to reveal Andras in nothing but linen sleeping bottoms, eyes tight with alertness foisted upon exhaustion, dagger gripped at the ready in his left hand. He sags with relaxation when he sees it's me, but the tension in his eyes doesn't release as he also takes stock of my jumpiness. 

"Are you alright?" He asks, still wielding his dagger and cataloguing the stretch of the hallway behind me. 

"No," I say furtively, and Andras stands aside to let me come in without another word. He shuts the door softly and the quarters are plunged into a gauzy half-dark from his shades shut tight against the daylight from the south gardens that sprawl beyond this corner room. I've poked fun at his space before, the splendor of it so at odds with his personality much more suited for some kind of side-of-the hill hovel; but now thinking of the joke makes me recall where I need to be within four days, and my anger pounds anew. 

Andras slides an arm around my shoulders and gathers me toward him, just a hint of inches shorter than he is, not pressing an explanation but inviting me to speak when I'm ready. His skin is morning-warm from his sheets despite the late afternoon hour, and through my fog of preoccupation I remember he's had night captain duties every other day since last month. 

“Shit. I'm sorry I woke you, I'll let you go back to sleep," I mutter, moving to twist out of his grip before he holds me closer and presses a kiss to my forehead to root me to my spot. 

"What's the matter," he whispers—not a question, but another rung on the undeniable and steady ladder of requests for me to _Open, Lucien, show me who you are so I can love you ever deeper_. I draw a breath that, surprisingly, shudders through my lungs. 

"Four days, Andras. I need to be Under the Mountain to do business within four days, and I just got back from a terrible fucking time with Autumn Court."

"Stay in these quarters," he says immediately, kissing my forehead again, "don't leave until you have to," a kiss to my jaw, "stay in bed all day if you must," another to my temple. He squares his eyes to mine, and in them I see the last dregs of tiredness sloughed off by thrumming alertness and care. "We can spend the next three days sparring and fucking and eating, return to our roots and all that."

I have to chuckle dryly at the ridiculousness of it, but I want desperately to take him up on it. I press my own kiss onto his lips, pliant and as delectably curved around their edges like the decorative hilts of his short-swords. "My dear captain, you offer too much."

"Never enough," Andras replies gruffly, and I lose all thoughts of cragged mountain halls and twisted red smiles as I'm lifted to the bed and made to forget anything that isn't the warmth and sturdiness of Andras, _Andras, my lovely Andras_. 

—

Three days pass far too quickly. I'm effectively hiding from Tamlin and the weight of my role in the comfort and safety of Andras' sheets, but I can't find it in me to care. I know I'm being juvenile, but I need to take all I can get before showing in front of Amarantha's court tomorrow. 

"What happens if you don't go?" Andras murmurs against my skin this afternoon, returning from a training module after a long watch and smelling of salt and sweat and feral purpose to shed his armor like a garter snake and immediately take to kissing his way down my torso. 

"Oh, something along the lines of our Court potentially facing disgusting and horrible wrath, nothing major," I reply lazily. 

" _Potentially_ ," Andras repeats slowly as I knit my fingers into his night-black hair when his mouth arrives at the crest of my hip. His eyes flick up to mine. "I think we can take the risk, don't you?"

"A hundred hellish monsters versus you alone; sure, they wouldn't stand a chance," I joke back, biting down on my lip with a smile when Andras tightens his hands on my lower back and growls low in his throat. 

"I'll go instead of you," he continues in a soft, graveled voice. "I can't dance or simper with other courtiers, but I certainly know how to tell that reddened bitch where to stick it." He begins to slowly unlace my trousers and I thrill at the brush of his knuckles against the fabric. 

"That's not a bad idea," I groan lightly, drawing a feathering breath. "Tell her to slink off to wherever she came from and never bother us again. I don't know if that's ever been done Under the Mountain."

"First time for everything, isn't there?" Andras smirks when he finishes pulling aside the fine cotton ties and wraps his hand around me, hallowed. 

"I'll be sure to credit you with any success," I whisper, thumbing at the corner if his smile. He nips my fingertip lovingly and brings me off into the dark heat of his mouth. 

When I wake the next morning, I want to curse the sun down to the depths of the earth. I stare up at the ceiling pleading _No, Mother forbid it, not yet_ , for a circuitous stretch of minutes before stirring ever so slightly to twist on my side and see Andras lying beside me. With that slightest disturbance on the mattress he awakes with a sharp inward sniff, his eyes dilated wide to the dark, but he eases into a steady exhale when he sees me. He pulls me into an enveloping embrace and breathes me in faintly at the junction of my neck. 

"If I could be there to rip every pair of leathery fucking wings from their shoulders," he hisses possessively, "I would relish it."

"I'll be back before you know it," I murmur back, not wanting to think about whatever awaits me in those craggy halls that feel like midnight. I want so desperately to delay my departure, wrapped up in Andras until everything besides him disappears into my periphery. I've been thinking for several years whether he's my mate or not—nothing has "clicked" or "locked" like all the old Fae say, but he adores me with just as much and if not more fervor as I do him. It isn't meaningless that he would tear apart monsters for me. But I remain patient. For all the progress I've made over the swaths of years, my heart is still unraveling all its own tangles. 

I kiss Andras once in deep, velvet, lingering farewell before slipping out of bed and into my dressing gown. I exit to the hallway without letting myself look back at the bed, and the walk to my quarters feels colder than usual. 

I wash quickly, binding my hair back in a severe knot that accents my glower and slices at my reflection like a knife. The finery I pick is detailed and austere: black trousers threaded with copper that cling tight like armor with calf-high boots to match, a cream-colored top of silk with green accents, long sleeves with more embroidery, and a collar that raises high to flirt with my throat. I fasten the emissary belt and dagger around my waist and then buckle my emerald-hilted sword alongside. I oiled and stroked it with a whetstone yesterday morning until it could slice wood so thinly that it came away looking like paper.

I stalk to the main foyer of the manor, where I conveniently run into Tamlin. His face is hard and his shoulders are tense, but he claps me into a brief comrade's embrace. I return it when I feel the slight twitch his his back muscles that betrays his nervousness. 

"No horses, just winnow. Spend as little time there as possible. Don't let her back you into some corner, you're smarter than she is, Lucien." His voice in my ear is low and urgent, so I respond by squeezing his upper arm solidly. Tamlin steps back and nods shallowly at me, his eyes unreadable. "I'll tell Andras the moment you return."

"No need, I'll be arriving back through the barracks," I reply, rougher than I'd intended but Tamlin doesn't seem bothered. We both sketch desultory bows to one another before I grip the hilt of my sword at my hip and will myself to the mouth of Amarantha's hideous cavern. As I see it approach through the vacuous plane of travel, I want to set it all aflame and run away. But this is my duty. I must be brief. I must be harsh.

A line of gnarled guards is set before the cave when I alight on the edge of a skeletal, dying wood. I've been here twice before, and so I know to say nothing and merely keep walking behind the two that break rank to lead me into the odious darkness like an obedient little ant. My jaw grinds like a mortar and pestle. I hope I'm the only one who can hear the sound. 

The throne room yawns open around us after two minutes of maddening silent trekking, and I steel my nerves to quit singing with wrath when I see Amarantha lounging on her throne. Her long legs are thrown in a graceful cross over one decorated chair arm and her well-shaped waste is curved back against the other. Her obnoxious little tits are pushed close in a low-slung bodice, and her hair is piled in a ridiculously complex heap of braids and delicate curls. I’ve heard rumors she spells herself fresh, keeping age and the scars of war at bay with heavy layers of woven wards. I don’t doubt it for a second. Amarantha smiles at me, but I can tell she's annoyed. 

"Are you my aperitif, Lucien?" She croons, waving the guards behind me away like they had just delivered a cupcake instead of a foreign emissary. I can't stop the sneer that skates across my face. 

"My lady," I spit, hoping she hears the bite of it, "I represent High Lord Tamlin of Spring Court with regards to your most recent missive.“

"Oh?" She sings, twirling that sickening fucking ring around her finger like a toy and curling her lips at me in a smile that's all poison. "I would so like to know what he's thinking of wearing to my party, it would suit us to be matching. I can have something ordered up in minutes, the seamstresses I have here are _ever_ so efficient."

"With all due respect, Amarantha," I try again, a bit louder, refusing to let her derail my purpose, "Lord Tamlin is unfortunately unable—“

"To refuse my tantalizing offer, I presume,” Amarantha cuts in like a jaguar, sitting up straight and letting the heavy beaded flow of her skirt fall back over her legs. She rises after a beat and slowly comes down her dias, pinning my stare with her dark, dark eyes as she moves toward me with steps that ring against the marble floor like bell tolls. For the first time I notice we're alone in the hall. When she arrives before me, just barely shorter for the height of her shoes, I see the furious tension around her mouth. "Tell me, Lucien, what is it your Lord has to say about my ‘most. Recent. Missive'?"

Her breath comes out like sweet roses, but the underbelly of the scent is mottled with carrion and decay. I swallow thickly and keep my eyes locked on hers, willing the depths of my strength to rise up and keep me steady. _If I could be there to rip every pair of leathery fucking wings from their shoulders, I would relish it_. I hear Andras' voice in my mind and stand the slightest bit taller. 

"He says," I hiss, seeing a flash of recoiling in Amarantha's gaze at my resistance, "to go back to the shithole you crawled out of and find someone there as baseless and disgusting as yourself to beg for a fuck instead."

A long stretch of silence spins itself between us. I count the pulse thrumming in Amarantha's neck out of the corner of my eye, quickening and quickening with the rage I can almost hear boiling in her veins. When she speaks, it comes out like an un-muzzled hound on the final thread of its fraying leash. 

"I wouldn't deign to beg for anything from a Lord who sends his lackey out to take care of his dirty work for him," she says in an airy voice. She steps closer and her skirts rattle faintly. I don't allow myself to believe that the shiny, beaded bits are really the thousands of child-sized vertebrae they have the shape of.

"This _lackey_ is a rite-bound Emissary of Prythian and knows how to fight back, you insufferable harpy." I bite down hard on suppressing a wince when Amarantha throws her head back and laughs, toothy and vicious. 

"Oh, Lucien," she sighs melodically, wiping theatrically at the corner of her eye, and I notice too late the flash of sharp, red nails that tears toward me to seize me around the neck. The fabric of my collar collapses with a soft, textile crunch, and I concentrate only on staring straight over Amarantha's shoulder and drawing steady, deep breaths through her threatening pressure. Shit. Fuck. Fucking shit. "You would have a hell of a lot less to worry about if I really was just a harpy."

I take a tenuous second to estimate how quickly I could rip my sword from its sheathe before she closes her fist around my throat, but she tightens the clench of her fingers and I feel one of her nails draw blood as it pricks through my skin. Not an option.

“Let me summon Tamlin,” I wheeze, “you can hear it from his own mouth. He will _not_ be your plaything.”

“Yes, you’ve tried to make that quite clear,” Amarantha hisses back sweetly, her words rushing out now surrounded completely by the stench of death, death, death. My hands begin to tremble as I realize how dire this moment has really become. “But I think I see a pretty gewgaw right here that I would like as a consolation prize.”

“At least have the decency to kill me before you fuck me,” I snarl, and her answering chuckle that floats on a pillowed purr is ice in my heart.

“I wouldn’t bow so low as to let the second-rate prick from an ambassador without a title, dead _or_ alive, anywhere _near_ my body, Cauldron no,” Amarantha spits. She forces me to my knees and I see a burst of white behind my eyes at the impact of it. She still has me by the neck and the world begins to fuzz black around its edges. “But you do have such lovely eyes, Lucien. I think you should learn how to _share_.”

Amarantha’s free hand slides up the left side of my face like the beginnings of a sickening caress, but I can see the dim light of the throne room glinting off of a gold detail lain into her sharp, ruby nails very, very close to my eye. No, no, _no, NO—_

_Pain._

Nothing is real except the molten explosion of pain in my skull.

The sound of my scream is otherworldly with agony, wild and naked and ripping like a tapestry from ceiling to floor. My vision goes haywire—my left eye squelches with a warping corruption of shapes and colors before filling with red and an instant snuff into utter darkness, my right eye is darting furiously in its socket as I look for something, _anything_ to focus on besides Amarantha getting off on her revenge as she claws slowly into my face. I give up on finding solace almost immediately and let it roll back as I continue to scream for anyone, anything to deliver me from this palace.

_Clawing into my face._

Amarantha is raking her fingers into my eye socket and pulling out my eye, and I’m helpless to defend myself.

My hearing has gone cloudy with adrenaline, as if I’m deep underwater, and since I can only see in shades of red and flashes of too-bright whites my vision is essentially gone. I can feel blood pouring down my face, dripping between Amarantha’s squeezing fingers on my neck and seeping down my cheeks onto my tongue. My mouth is open in an endless wail, and everything tastes like a mouthful of soiled copper. I smell the sickening tang of blood and fluid pouring from my rent face. 

I need this to kill me. I need to die here. I can’t return like this.

After what feels like an eternity and might very well be with the sort of magic at work in this infernal place, Amarantha releases my neck and lets me collapse to the floor. I suck in more air to keep screaming in pain, gasping around the horrid and shapeless bulk of my torment. My hands fly up to my face, probing immediately into the blood-soaked, weeping cavern from where my eye was gouged. _I can never see the sprawl of the gardens again, I can never watch another sunrise, I can never see the way Andras smiles at me, I can never learn how to spar with him like this, I can never be whole—_

Amarantha says something that sounds to my panic-muffled ears like “Serves you right,” and I let my surviving eye careen around the room to find her again. She’s still right in front of me with my eye held neatly between to fingers. I try to train my screams down to grating heaves of breath to retaliate with anything, any cobbled string of curses at all, but I can only manage broken howls of pain. She smiles down at me with vile pleasure. To my dread, she lifts the eye up to her face and kisses it like the tip of a cock. Her tongue circles around it once in slow, lazy amusement, and she gives it another open-mouthed suck before pushing it past her lips and teeth and eating it whole.

I vomit immediately, violently, and can’t comprehend the horror of what’s been done. I’m lying pooled in my own blood, vomit, probably piss, and I can hear the utter, desolate silence of this place as it presses in on me. Amarantha has left. I suppose she’s going to let me either die or find my own way out, and both options seem equally hellish to me in this moment. After an unknown stretch of time, I’ve dissolved into helpless, dry sobs. I haven’t moved from this spot in the center of the chamber. I’m a heap of blood-soaked, weakened madness.

_You could have been civil_ , my vicious inner voice rises up to gnash at my arteries like a war dog. _Andras told you to bite back and look where it got you. You’re even more useless now than you were before._

I bawl a muddle of nonsense out loud to try and chase away the invisible demon digging into my senses like the ripping tug of Amarantha’s fingers. I try to push myself up into a sit, my head spinning, and I have to stop with my elbows propped under me when I vomit again onto the ground—pure bile.

_Andras will never be able to look at you as long as he lives. You’ll never feel his warmth again. Tamlin will relieve you of your duties. You aren’t brave enough to kill yourself. You’ll be bound to wander like a pathetic wastrel until you die in two thousand years without anyone giving you a second glance except to stare at the hideous failure carved into your face._

“ _STOP IT!”_ I roar, the last dose of my fading power as my strength fades like trickling ore. A rattle of armor and weapons comes suddenly from the hallway to my right as my voice continues to echo up through the ceiling, and terror grips me again like Amarantha’s nails around my neck. I scramble into a sit, trying desperately to ignore the way my skull pounds with the effort. Foolishly, I focus on home— _foyer, staircase, barracks, flowers, fields, arches—_ and my winnowing path flickers like a candle alongside a shred of rage. I can still leave. I’m an example. Of course Amarantha would let me escape to show Tamlin how serious her demands are.

The clatter of approaching guards is getting louder, so I push with the hulk of my addled mind to expand the road through the fabric of space in order to at least stumble across it in one consolidated heap. _Not in once piece any longer._ The opening hiccups wide enough for a moment, and with a final push I’m through. Sensation swallows me up into blessed nothingness, and I almost forget to will myself out on the other side for how wonderful it feels to be suspended in pure absence for a moment. But I can’t stay here. I need help.

I feel my body connect with cool stone and I don’t get up, can’t get up—I don’t _have_ to get up, for a sudden collective shriek and leaping away of courtiers and soldiers and servants clears my own space. I must look truly horrific. I’ve landed myself in the dining hall. A small part of me still clinging to sanity is sorry I’ve interrupted their dinner—Mother save me, it’s been _hours_.

Somebody is crouched in front of me, repeating my name above the clamor of panic in the dining hall. I barely manage to open my right eye, see a glimpse of yellow hair and furious green eyes darting over me as if cataloguing the damage from an earthquake. Tamlin twists his head over his shoulder and roars “FETCH NUAN! SOMEBODY FIND ANDRAS!”

I draw a rattling breath, close my eye as I feel the warmth of Tamlin’s palm cup my head, and fade into unconsciousness with Andras’ name echoing through my head like a shout into an empty, deadened well.


	6. Grasshopper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Auras, young fox. Lose one sight and yet gain another; when you awaken, I bid thee to see through the depths of blood and sinew into the beating heart of the soul. You will sense...and you will know."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

Nuan builds me an eye that is, by all counts, better than organic.

The little nymph with her metal arm and exacting, ferocious stare builds me an eye that can see veins of magic and the heartbeats of creatures large and small if I focus on it—she teaches me how to do it in a haze, knits the knowledge deep into my instinct in her own strange way without me asking for it. She fits the eye perfectly into the socket so that when the swelling heals and inevitable infection is staved off, the shape of my face is exactly the same beneath the thin white ropes of scarring. Nuan is proud of herself. Tamlin is, as always, thoroughly impressed.

He never goes so far as to say the loss of my eye is a good thing, but I see it in the way he watches me during my first hunt out once I'm deemed healthy enough to ride, when I bring home more game than any of the border guards combined. His awkward compliments fall like lead on my deadened senses. I know he assuages his guilt by telling himself this is a surprisingly welcome change for me. For the Lucien that _he_ needs, Lucien the steel-nerved Emissary. I wonder sometimes if he realizes how much it hurts me to catch him looking at my metal eye with pleased interest.

I don't have the heart to truly tell Tamlin how much the little brass-wrought machine rankles me. I know I should be embracing this tool like the advantageous weapon it is, but every time I look in a mirror, I want to tear it out and rage against the Mountain until I die. 

I hate myself. But no matter how deeply this new eye digs into me, none of the pain compares to having to see Andras grapple silently with the guilt he has no right to shoulder. 

I remember scraps of the chaos that had ensued once I returned to Spring after Amarantha mangled me. The terror in Tamlin's voice before I passed out for the first time; the feeling of hands probing my wounds, careful not to press too hard but still searing me through my thick sleep; the horrid, keening, furious howl that seemed to shake the very earth when it echoed through the grounds as I was ushered out on a bed sling to leave for a shuttered workshop in neutral territory—I had immediately known then in the deep fog of my unconsciousness that Andras had been found and told. As I watched the ceiling sway above me, in a brief fragment of lucidity, I had prayed Andras didn't blindly wound whomever had delivered the message.

Andras' pain is the emotional twin to the physical torment that bludgeoned me Under the Mountain.

The first time I spoke with him after Nuan woke me from an induced healing sleep, Andras was standing sentinel-rigid by the doorway. I had seen in him with my new vision a pulse of tightened nerves coursing constant in his blood that exploded into gold through his veins the moment he registered I was awake. He didn't cry—I don't think Andras has ever been capable of crying, he remains too rational to let something as trivial as weeping invade his warrior's mind—but the guilt in his honey-yellow stare would have been ripe fruit for heavy rivulets of tears in any male with less resolve. 

"I will bathe that sordid bitch in years of her own blood," Andras had hissed to me, holding my hand tight and warm, his body language chanting _I'm so sorry, let me fix this_. With my throat grated raw by sharp strangulation and hours of screaming, all I could do to reply was nod before he kissed my knuckles fervently like a bloodless but binding oath. 

Ten months later, I should be feeling out the road to normalcy as if getting used to a repaired limb. But sometimes I'm so full of anger I can hardly breathe. It isn't nightmares—I’m past the nightmares, I'm past the phantom pain, I'm past the jarring panic attacks that used to leap at me from tinkling sounds like a bone-woven skirt or the texture of jellied food that might morph into eyeballs if I scraped the mash from my tongue. I'm supposed to be _Lucien_ again. But I feel more like the Lucien my brothers once tried to mold me into, furious and ready to snap at any moment. Volatile. Dangerous. My magic is haywire. I've singed my bedcovers in my sleep more times than I can count and accidentally melted the equivalent of a full set of cutlery in my fists; snuffed out entire hallways of wall sconces with a gasp; so badly burned Andras' shoulder one night last month amidst a shuddering, blinding climax that it left a mark for a week.

I'm terrified of what I might turn into if this continues downwards. 

Because of all my imbalance, I haven't sparred with Andras in far too long. I don't want to hurt him, _burn_ him again, but I've never explained it to him that way for fear he'd take it personally. Tonight, though, he insists on it, claiming he needs it for the stress relief almost as much as I surely do.

"I miss you," Andras murmurs, proffering my dueling leathers and the emerald sword like the quince flowers at Nynsar so many years ago. _This is what I've become, then. Rather than petals in a quiet forest, I am pounding pulse and steel._ I clench my fists secretly at my sides. 

"I don't know if I'm ready, Andras," I reply, my voice dry.

"You might never be ready," Andras says softly, and it sounds like the words come to him with difficulty. "You might never feel like it's alright to fight your way through this, but let me help you get as close as you can."

My metal eye hints at the hope coursing through his heart, and despite the heavy doubt in my own I can't bring myself to refuse.

"Don't let me use a sword yet," I murmur finally. "Please, let's just start with hand-to-hand and—and see if I can do that."

"Okay," Andras breathes, setting the gear down swiftly and pulling me into a tight embrace. I hesitate for a split second in his grip, feeling strength and warmth and everything I hope to restore to my own insides, before clinging to him like a rock in a hurricane.

Once we make our way to the training grounds, the walk is silent. Andras' hand is steady on my shoulder, but I can't shake the humming in my core. My heart is beating too quickly. My thoughts are whirring in a frantic loop. The high ceiling and dirt floor makes me recall passionate bursts of decision and combat, and I try to lock down my magic so Andras doesn't end up a charred, blistered mess by my hand.

Andras takes me gently by the chin and pours a soft kiss to my mouth when we reach the center of the floor. I try to quirk my best half-smile to match his. 

"Nuan says it can't fall out, remember," I say awkwardly, still hating to reference the metal eye. "Don't hold back to be needlessly tender."

"I remember. Careful what you wish for, Lucien," Andras replies with a loving smirk, and in that moment I wish more than perhaps any other time for his graceful surety in all things. We ready our stances, and I watch the glimmer of his blood circulate in his body for several beats through my sensory vision before drawing a deep, shaking breath. 

_"Set!"_

As we launch ourselves at one another, low and swift like creatures in the grass, I shut off my thoughts and let raw exertion guide my body. I let my muscles and bones communicate with their own language, more than willing to let them take over the addled discourse of my mind and fill it with jabs, feints, and complex webs of footwork. 

There is no banter traded between the two of us besides our breathing. Every solid _whup_ of leather armor as we batter one another for weak points and gained ground is its own interjection. We dance across the dirt like whirling retaliation incarnate for twenty minutes straight. I feel sweat come off me like a second skin. I don't give myself any room to think. I just _am._

Another thirty minutes pass, and I'm sure I wouldn't have lasted this long if my rational side was anywhere close to being engaged. I notice Andras' eyes flash, under his own sweat-beaded brow, with reigned-in surprise when I manage to parry a kick aimed at my shins and send him reeling back several steps. As we square off, circling each other to find another entry point to our sparring, he spits solidly into the dirt and shakes a fall of hair from his face. 

"You're not giving in," he states. His voice is rough, his eyes are bright. I feel nothing but my own heartbeat thundering in my neck. 

"I don't think I'll be doing that ever again any time soon," I snarl, my own words rendered cruel as rusted blades for the heaving of my breath. Andras's eyes tighten and I watch a flash of hurt whip through him like sun on metal. 

"You're holding back," he growls.  

"I don't want to hurt you," I bite out. Andras suddenly rushes at me, elbows away my frantic block, pins me with my arms bound low on my back in his calloused hands before I can beat him back with a well-placed kick. I taste anger like flint on the back of my tongue.

"When have you ever hurt me?" Andras pants, his voice tinged with wilderness and fervor. "I want you to open up, Lucien, I only ever want you to _open up!_ You're strangling yourself, I need to see you free again." His grip on my wrists tightens, and I see a flash of Amarantha's nails across the back of my skull. _Strangling yourself—Strangling—The pain of my eye sliding out of its socket—_ “Fucking _fight_ , Lucien!"

I let loose a roar, tearing my hands from Andras' grip as he leaps back to defend himself. I feel heat building under my skin, the delicious curl of kindling licking beneath my fingernails, and I can't hold it back as I rush at Andras. _He invited this, he isn't afraid, you won't hurt him_ , the mantra spinning through my head as I watch his body carefully for any signs of panic or terror—he belies complete calm, if not the touch of a thrill in his labored breath as he dodges every one of my wild, heat-limned punches. Smoke begins to plume up off my knuckles in flowing fury.

As I move forward, gaining new ground and kicking up the dirt behind me with smoldering embers, all I can conceptualize is venting the hate and fear from every outlet in my body. It flies around me in abstract, a vague and stinking cloud of cloying pressure. My growing exhaustion makes it worse, makes me more and more frustrated with the inability to make whole the fragmented pieces of my prone failures. Each thrown punch and tight-locked guard from me is soon twinned with a heavy grunt, a snarl that sounds like I could be a beast beside Andras' wolven form. I'm breaking down like a sputtering set of gears, spinning out.

My right fist connects in an audible smack with Andras' palm, cold cinders puffing out around it pathetically from the force. "Don't give up," Andras growls, "you can't give _up!"_

"You don't understand!" I cry out, so pushed to every one of my limits that my voice comes out high and cracking, precarious. "I'm not _whole_ anymore, there's no way to fix that!" I throw another punch, and Andras stops it short by catching my forearm. I grit my teeth and seethe through them like a trapped animal, ripping my own arms back toward myself. Black smoke billows from my hands, but the fire is nowhere in sight—choked, constricted, _strangled_. I launch forward and tackle Andras to the ground, fixated on the solid whack of our bodies as they hit the dirt.

We scrabble at each other's armor, and when Andras manages to get a hand hooked onto the edge of my breastplate I find myself flipped and slammed onto my back. My breath leaves me in a tight rush as I stare up at Andras, can do nothing but try and gasp as I bore my eyes into his. The yellow there is deep, complex as amber, singing with fortitude as my throat works to draw new air and my hands rake at his and pour smoke like a severed artery of combustion. 

"You are _not. Broken,_ Lucien," Andras insists, and the moment his voice trembles is when my muscles respond again and suck fresh air into my lungs. My eye sees a bolt of heavy sorrow plunged through his heart like a bristled arrow, hazed in the strange half-reality the machine shows me overtop of everything as it stands out from his chest. I stop fighting his grip for a moment to listen to him, tendons tense and pulse hammering. Andras swallows thickly as if his words are gummed with paste. "You are _everything_. Now _fight."_

The smoke from my palms gutters as I clench my jaw, Andras' words ringing and amplifying in me like a room of crystal resonance at the top of a mountain. Andras rolls off of me just in time, springing back to his feet two yards away as my palms glow orange. I push myself into a staggering stand, panting like the beginnings of sniveling tears, but these aren't tears building, Cauldron no, I know this feeling from long, long ago—

I suck in a deep breath and bellow, full-bodied, as flames erupt from my mouth and shoot volcanic from my hands. I sear the dirt with it while the visions of my terror at Amarantha's feet flicker past my vision in sped-up motion. _Serves you right, serves you right, seRVES YOU RIGHT, SERVES YOU RIGHT—_

_"LET ME GO!"_ I roar, fire curling and snapping out from my tongue like a whip with each word, and I let out a heaving shout with a boiling ball of flames and smoke unfurling in its wake. It hits the dirt and licks away into the air, twisting off into smoke before it reaches the edge of the arena floor. Crackling, rushing fire takes one more round sloughing through my limbs along the thoroughfares of my blood before feel it exit in finality through my mouth like a hot sigh, my muscles loosened and my second wind restored. Steam whispers off my shoulders as I stand stock still for several breaths, collecting myself. When I turn slowly to face Andras again where he stands at a safe distance near the weapons rack, he is surging bright in my eye with equal parts awe and pride. 

"I'm not broken," I repeat back to him, and although my breathing is still intensely labored my voice feels stronger than it has in almost a year. Andras' eyes are unreadable, enigmatic and beautiful and _mine_ , as he lifts two swords off the rack and slides one to me across the floor. 

"I know. Now fight _me."_


	7. Stretch Your Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The darkness and the ghost,  
> They dance so sweet and slow  
> Dug-out from below there  
> To damn the gods.
> 
> A grip that will hold  
> So tight, and close  
> Around my throat with  
> The weight of all our lives..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

It’s another six months before we hear anything from Amarantha, six months of me coming to accept my metal eye as an inevitable tool to bear. It isn’t the scars that bother me, but the way the eye makes me stand out these days. Tamlin has sent me on a few soft assignments to ease me back into the job; the truest test has been to keep my temper in check when I inevitably see other courtiers casting little sideways glances at me and whispering to one another like I won’t notice. I always see their pulses lined with fluttery bits of nervousness when I return the stares. I’ve been very good about not letting anything escalate beyond my own brand of those petty returns—it never fails to shut them up anyways. Manufactured sympathy bothers me far worse these days than public offense. 

My new piece of brutal jewelry even gains me clout with some of the High Lords. I’m seen into public audience twice in as many weeks, to Winter Court and Dawn Court for extensions of commendation to my resilience in ambassadorial duty. Unsurprisingly, each is followed up with an intensely private meeting in which I am offered sympathies and commiseration for Amarantha’s wickedness. It takes even more commendable restraint to keep from shouting _Your words are wind unless you go and stop her yourself_. But I understand how these politics work. I understand that an ally in word, while less reliable than an ally in deed, is plenty welcome in a tide like this.

My promise to myself and the memory of Jesminda more than three-hundred years ago to see my court prosper is getting harder and harder to grasp with every passing decade. Prythian is slowly bleeding out on the marble floor of her land, bleeding from an eye socket plucked empty by usurpers.

The day we get the harrowing letter delivered on foot is pleasantly rainy, with a quick drizzle falling in through dappled clouds. I watch the wind chase shafts of sunlight through openings in the darkened sky over our wide northern fields through a casement window in the library, only half-attentive to the book on Day Court histories propped up in one hand.

“Lucien.”

Tamlin’s voice in a tone of quartz and steel spurs me to turn, setting the book down on an end table. I have a feeling I won’t be picking it up for the rest of the afternoon with the concern etched deep into Tamlin’s brow.

“A foot soldier from Under the Mountain just rode in—” Tamlin pauses to let the echo of my chair banging to the floor finish fading into the height of the ceiling when I stand in fury. “We’ve a letter.”

“Burn it,” I snarl, hand already outstretched with a tongue of blue fire fizzling in my palm. Tamlin’s gaze meets mine; if he could still any bit of this permanent rage for that accursed place branded on my soul, it would have been stilled long ago in one of our countless late-night discussions on tact.

“I can’t do that, it’s an invitation,” Tamlin says evenly. “A ball. She’s throwing a ball to apologize.”

_“Apologize?”_ The word comes out on an incredulous burble of humorless laughter from the depths of my guts. “I knew she was heartless, but I didn’t know she’d lost her mind as well. Maybe she’s run out of eyes to eat and has started taking chunks of her own brain.”

Tamlin clenches hard on his jaw and closes his eyes to sniff a shallow, frustrated sigh. “You know what I mean, Lucien.”

“No, Tamlin, I really, honestly don’t. Please do me the honor of explaining it to me.” The maddeningly steady cadence of my reply is not lost on him, for he levels a warning glare at me as he draws a roll of parchment from his tunic. My nostrils flare and my guts turn involuntarily; I have never felt so much concentrated hate for one woman in my entire life.

“ _To the denizens of Spring Court, High and lower alike,”_ Tamlin reads aloud at a quick clip, “ _an invitation to an evening of masquerade dancing and feasting in one month’s time Under the Mountain. Extended upon the utmost apology to the accident borne unto hi—“_

“ACCIDENT?” I roar, silenced down to seething when Lucien pins me with another look.

“ _…the accident borne unto his High Lordship Tamlin’s Emissary, for which We are eternally sorry had to befall such a lovely countenance. It is Our hope that the masquerade will encourage Emissary Lucien to feel comfortable in attendance, his disfigurement thus covered and masked with the rest of Prythian. We extend tidings to his health and the hope of wide-spread attendance to this sumptuous ball. His High Lordship’s response with either acceptance or unfortunate deferral is humbly requested within one week. Ever yours, Amarantha.”_

The library is deathly quiet for nearly a minute as I process the staggering depth of utter bullshit heaped into such a short letter.

“All the Courts will be presiding,” Tamlin finally says softly. “I've heard that Summer, Winter, Dawn, and Day have all received similar letters, so doubtless the others have too.” He looks at me with something that twists like sadness for moment. “Lucien, if we don't attend, the affront of it will be havoc on whatever scraps of peace we have left because of her. ‘Unfortunate deferral’ has enough ice in it, I’m surprised the fucking parchment isn’t frozen.”

I flip the end table beside me violently, sending the little book fluttering like a bush quail and the table clattering end over end across the library. I don't meet Tamlin's eyes as I squeeze my fists and try to keep my breathing from ramping up out of control. 

"We'll go then," I spit simply. I'm not so blind that I don't understand what he means—there have been battles fought in these lands for far less than a snubbed invitation. I will not see my Court destroyed by my inability to cope, but that won't make it any easier. 

I can hear Tamlin letting out a tenuous breath and he takes a step towards me. "This doesn't mean we're giving in. We show up for the sake of politics, we all make graceful faces, and we all come home without bloodshed. I will _not_ give her the inch she needs to take her mile. We'll find a way to pry her out of this place, I promise."

No sound occupies the library for another moment besides the gentle whir of my eye in its socket as I focus and refocus again and again on the shapes of the tiles under my feet. _I promise_ has always been a favorite of Tamlin's, and he's always managed to deliver on it. I can't bring myself to tell him I doubt that now. 

"Let me know if I need to make my own mask," I hiss, bowing shallowly to Tamlin before stalking out of the library and barreling down the staircase. I desperately need air.

Andras is out on border command. The other ambassadors will only irritate me in this mood. I can't very well circle back to the library, and I've left my book in a heap on its floor. I let my anger heat itself to a boil in my chest as I burst through the north exit and storm into the winding masses of grass and flowers. I feel cool plips of rain dot my skin, plunging myself on trudging feet deeper into this haven of sweet greenery. When I reach the arc of a hulking willow tree, laden with long curled leaves that mutter faintly in the raindrops, I lean back against it and stare up into the sky as I count my breathing to slow down my racing heart.

Watching the rain come down through the leaves from this vantage, I imagine what it might be like to be spelled to sleep under water until this all blows over.

—

Within six days of the announcement Tamlin makes to our Court that we've been invited to Amarantha's ball, one of the resident artists has built masks for us all from every metal and gem under the sun. The courtiers, as if they've momentarily forgotten this masquerade is to take place in the hellhole Under the Mountain, preen as the delicate pieces are distributed throughout the afternoon. Even I must admit over my pitching, mounting unease that the masks are absolutely gorgeous. It makes my heart pull slightly with guilt that I had been so short with Tamlin about the triviality the other afternoon.

"It was a fine idea to design them all in similar fashion, don't you think?" A youngish courtier asks me in the foyer, smiling fondly at the rabbit  mask in her hands as she traces the detailing on its silver face. There are different creatures formed for each one of us, all painstakingly designed to fit our roles in Court and personalities to the letter. I wonder how much time these took. I wonder if they were truly worth the effort.

Seeing my name stamped into the velvet lining on the inside of a mask in a group with our other emissaries, I pick up the artistic curve of metal and fabric and turn it over. I can't hold back a dry little bark of laughter. Of course; a fox. Wrought with copper, a metal I've learned to love in so many other accents on my clothing here, the score marks to make fur and whiskers are so realistic I find myself touching at its surface like the courtier with the rabbit mask. There are short dangles of pearled beads and pleated accent metals placed tastefully across it's cunning little shape, and when I test its fit against my face, leaving my vision surprisingly unobstructed and perched softly across the bridge of my nose, I don't hate it nearly as much as I had expected. I tuck the trinket into the inner pocket of my vest to return to my quarters, and as I look back over my shoulder at the humming eagerness of everyone milling in the foyer, my insides shift with worry. I try to push away the distant thought that we're all being herded into a pit of spears. 

The rest of the day slogs by like broken clockwork. Another gentle rain called to water the gardens nests a soft, lazy haze over everything. No hunting, no holding court—had I not been able to look to my left and see the portentous, vulpine arch of my masquerade piece on my drafting table, it would have been blissful. I lose myself in thick volumes of minor histories and nearly forget to eat dinner.

Andras returns from patrol and comes to my quarters just as the last rays of the long-lingering sun disappear into the tree line. I'm reading by candlelight with heavy eyelids by the time I hear his knock, and when I open the door I'm bolted with a split second of confused shock. Andras grins at me from under his mask, a wolf's stare of cool calculation in black obsidian. His eyes are glittering gold through their openings, and he removes it to show me the full beauty of his smile when he sees me arrested in brief alarm. 

"Aren't they amazing?" He says as he steps into the room, turning the mask over in his hands.

"Mine is a fox," I deadpan, shutting the door behind Andras as he erupts into a laugh. 

"Of course it is, a fox amidst the rabbits," he says through the end of a chuckle. It hadn't even crossed my mind, that subtle little poke at my origins against all the other ambassadors—but I know it wasn’t done out of vulgarity. The late-dawning wit of it leaches away some of my seeping anxiety. I turn to face Andras as he sets his mask down beside mine behind him, and he looks at me as if I bring the sun through the sky each morning. "Hunted any good sport lately, cur fox?"

"Only a border wolf," I reply, shedding my dressing gown and snuffing the light. It leaves little for the shadows of the evening to play against besides the cut of Andras' austere profile and the glimmer of eager encouragement in his eyes. "But he's quite my favorite sport."

As I go to my knees before him, Andras' fingers in my hair are like the gentle branches of the old north willow in the rain—curling, catching, cradling me in deep and temporary serenity. 

—

The following three weeks pass far too quickly. Before I know it, I'm fastening on my best finery and frowning so intently into my mirror that I fear the lines of it might cleave my skin apart.

This evening's finery tunic is full crushed velvet in forest green so dark it's nearly black. The embroidery is truly overkill, all copper and gold and swaths of sparrows flying across my shoulders beaded so finely they look made from sand, but if Amarantha has the gall to call this farce an _apology_ then I'm damn well going to look like a king. I finish sweeping my hair up into a woven complexity of braids at the nape of my neck before stooping to lace a pair of burnished black boots up to my knees. The emissary belt goes heavily around my waist once more, and I fasten the emerald sword to it like a bad spell of deja vu. Yet again, I'll be facing Hybern's prize bitch in her corner for the second time in less than a year. I stay a twist of pale smoke that puffs from my mouth when I spit out a low oath to my empty room. 

The final piece to the ensemble fits comfortably across my eyes. Seeing it on my face feels like the awkward dead air between lovers in a bad tryst; _You’re lovely to look at, really, you are, but I’ve got to be going now._ I sigh tightly at my reflection, straighten a cuff, and exit the room like a billowing rush of defiance.

The foyer and most of the entrance stairway is choked with our entire Court waiting about eagerly for Tamlin to show at the top of the grand staircase and lead a pre-scouted—pre-warded, pre-guarded, and pre-trapped as well, if there becomes need for swift escape—trek across the grounds to a waypoint that will take us in steady bulk to the entrance of Amarantha’s hall. I would prefer to avoid the crush of bodies, and so I take a byway up to Tamlin’s study through the gap behind a staircase at the end of the barracks hall. When I reach the marbled space and shut the wall behind me, I’m mildly surprised to see Tamlin dressed in something other than green. We seem to be on the same page of obstinate regality—he’s outfitted head to toe in goldenrod and dark brown to match a horned mask crafted to mimic perfectly his changeling form.

“Good timing,” he says simply, “you look very well put-together.”

I accept the awkward compliment with an involuntary smirk and nod at Tamlin, noting his evident nerves and a hint of malice in the way the outer corners of his eyes bunch up slightly. “I would like to think I’ll come home in one piece this time, so I dressed the part,” I reply darkly, and it takes a moment for Tamlin to realize he's allowed to chuckle spasmodically at my jab. It pangs vaguely to tell myself I’m really going back there, I’m truly going to face those walls and that floor again, but I push the thought to the side for now as I watch Tamlin relax just an inch.

“We’ll be alright in there,” he murmurs, “won’t we Lucien?” I’m not imagining the lilt of manic grasping on the edge of his words.

“There will be other Courts there,” is all I can manage to say, because I don’t enjoy lying to my High Lord and Tamlin knows it.

Before one of us can dig this shallow hole of cyclical dwelling any deeper, Tamlin’s commanders appear at the door in a gleaming gold-and-leathern row. Their Court armor has always been my favorite—opulent, detailed, exquisite trappings that made their bodies look like living trees. With their masquerade masks on now, they look like a rank of dreamscape militia. I catch and hold dear in the core of my heart the look of pure approval Andras rakes across me from behind his wolf’s facade.

“My Lord,” the second commander Bron says with a graceful soldier’s bow to Tamlin, “the Spring Court awaits your guidance to the Mountain.”

—

Were I not surrounded by my own people, I would be a living wreck right now. I’m sure everyone is staring in their own furtive little ways—my metal eye can barely stop whipping from focus to different focus every second as I try to get a read on the magic in this place. I probably look like a malfunctioning automaton. I really do try not to let it distract me from coming off as collected as possible.

Being able to look over at Andras periodically keeps me from clawing my way up the walls and trying to tear it all down with my bare hands. He’s the picture of trained serenity, drinking small measures of heavy liquor with guard commanders from other Courts and mingling smartly with courtiers. We’re moving in our own careful dance through the cavernous hall filled to bursting with Prythians, brushing hands and trading a few turns of phrase back and forth that are all underscored with the disguised, shared sentiments of _Don’t worry, I’m still watching you_ and _I hate this fucking party_.

I do my duty of looking fine for the other court Emissaries and High Lords, accepting lofty sympathies that, more often than not, turn into spinning stories only vaguely connected to the plight of my lost eye. Everyone has been told it was a dueling accident. Whenever I force myself to chuckle or nod along pleasantly, wine goblet biting into my fingers like a coned pewter fang and the desire to vomit stabbing into my guts, I scan the hall for Amarantha. Wherever she is, she's burrowed in deep. Or extremely _fashionably_ late. 

I keep tabs on Tamlin as well, ever the resplendent figure so at odds with the dour walls and pillars around us. The Spring Court masks are certainly the most deeply thought-out of all—something special beyond the fabric and beadwork I see from other courts. Tamlin's changeling mask makes him seem like something just barely bridging the divide between here and the realms beyond. Something I'm sure Amarantha will lunge at to keep down here. 

The press of bodies and mounting merriment around me begins to prickle my skin with sweat beneath my finery, and as the heat of wine and too-rich food and the exhaustion of constantly being on, on, _on_ combine in my guts I find myself gravitating closer and closer to Andras. He catches my wrist gently on a particularly fraught pass around his right shoulder, concern lining his eyes beneath the obsidian wolf. 

"Yes?" He murmurs close to my ear, and I find my heart pounding louder than I had realized in my fevered spur to keep moving, keep busy, pay no attention to the distress beneath my surface. 

"I hope—I would like to see the lady of the Mountain sooner rather than later," I reply, catching myself before I blurt _If I don't catch sight of her soon, I'm going to start crawling up the walls._ The last thing I need now is eavesdroppers. I let my gaze alone communicate the true discomfort in me to Andras. 

"I think we all would, of course, but presenting such beauty takes more time than you or I know," Andras says through a good-natured sigh, but his look flashes bright with destructive agreement. He wends an arm around my waist as if it was made to fit there and resumes his conversation with a sturdy Summer Court commander, keeping me close for a comforting stretch of minutes that does more for my sanity than anything I'd tried until then. 

With the last flourish from the small instrumental ensemble tucked into the corner, a smattering of applause goes up. I look sideways to Andras, intending another disguised quip about the off-kilter entertainment in this place, but his trained stare of patroller's alertness on the opposite end of the hall stills my tongue. His fingers tighten against my tunic and I steel myself to follow his attention. 

My insides pitch and my metal eye refocuses wildly as the horde of ball goers watch Amarantha enter at her dias. Hailed greetings and more patches of applause bubble around like a simmering stew. Thankfully she's forgone her macabre study of bones this time, outfitted in a plunging, brassy gown that looks as though its fabric has been collected from the drippings of an ore refinery. With her red hair braided back and white skin revealed in wide swaths for the cut of her dress, she looks like the fire that threatens to swallow us all. 

"I'm so pleased to see such a full hall this evening," Amarantha sings, raising a goblet to the lot of us gathered before her, a sea of fish crammed tight in her net—I try not let myself stare at the spot at the foot of that shallow staircase where I bled and wept and screamed until my world went black. Andras draws a slow, calming thumb in a circle where he grips my side as my back goes ramrod with storming memories. 

"She said this was for peace, perhaps she means it now," he whispers, barely audible even to me at the shell of my ear. I try not to crush his optimism and make my responding squeeze on his palm as neutrally loving as possible. 

"I know the years have been less than kind to some...relations," Amarantha continues, and I'm certainly not imagining the flash of her honed attention barreling over me in a glance. My expression is trained into bland deference though; I'm grateful for the mask's ability to shadow the true depth of ire in my eyes from this distance. "So consider this, my fair and powerful neighbors, the beginning of eternal peace."

Surprised murmurs flow through the crowd like sharks in the collective. _Eternal? Who can promise eternal anything in Prythian? How can she guarantee this? Perhaps she's right. We've been in talks for decades—_

"Eternal peace," Amarantha calls above the muttering, her voice echoing around the hall in a boneyard treble before she quiets it back to speaking tone, "on a condition I see very fit, considering what's at stake."

The hall goes tomb silent. I hear Andras' breathing beside me, still and slow as though he has his eye on a blighted, rabid hart on a hunt. Expectant. The entire gathering of mingled Courts is hanging on her words, and even I can't help but keep my ears primed for what I know, in my heart of hearts, Amarantha is about to demand. 

"Lord Tamlin of the Spring Court," she croons, an arrogant smile twisting her blood-red lips. As if the ocean of us has been parted by wind, every courtier turns to seek the image of Tamlin standing rigid with a flute of wine in his hand. My eye sees panic and anger wrestling for control in his veins before a surging crash of summoned calm fills his system instead. I would have been impressed, had I any room left inside me beyond frantic calculation and mounting panic of my own. 

"Amarantha," Tamlin responds smoothly with a handsome bow. He says nothing more as they meet eyes across the hall—Lord versus ancient commander, beast versus beast. 

"As you know, I am so very _deeply_ sorry for what befell your talented emissary last year," Amarantha says. I bite down hard on the breath that catches at the height of my throat and patently ignore the glances tossed at me from courtiers at every angle. My face flushes hot but I focus on the sturdy presence of Andras, the sound of his uninterrupted pulse, and the duel of wills unfolding like rot before me. 

"Thanks to the skills and grace of my people, the situation was dealt with swiftly. It brought no permanent harm," Tamlin says tightly. 

"Yes, I'm delighted to see Lucien in attendance tonight." Amarantha sends another twisted smile through the air at me, hitting home in my chest like a crossbow bolt. Andras grips my side harder as though that could fend off the hurt and my eyes claw to arrest Amarantha's attention like a fist at her collar, all pretense of disinterest dropped— _you’ve got us down here, you bitch, just tell us what you want._

"You know, the masquerade tonight is also in honor of your strength, my Lord." Amarantha shrugs off my stare like a subterranean breeze and looks back to Tamlin.

"Is it now?" The coolness in his voice is primed like an animal sharpening its claws. 

"For your gifts, of course." Amarantha gestures broadly at the masked Prythians and smiles proudly. "You and your guard can become such alluring creatures, so I wanted to embody that power with our collective decor."

Stiff grumbles and some intrigued sounds come from faeries I know belong to Courts of strained and grudging alliance with us, males and females who are less than thrilled with Tamlin's rule, but there are considerably less voices rising now than there were before. More and more courtiers are falling silent under the tension they can feel in this knife's edge of an exchange. The combination of perfumes and body heat are rising to a heady high—I lock my fingers into Andras' to keep me from shouting with frustration. 

"I appreciate your thoughtfulness, my Court thanks you for the honor," Tamlin says with another bow. He makes to turn back to the Winter ambassador standing beside him awkwardly in the spotlight of attention, clearly struck still to his position by the onslaught of attention, when Amarantha laughs airily. 

"My Lord Tamlin, that was merely my preamble." She steps down from the dias and walks toward Tamlin like an advancing serpent, courtiers further parting around her path. "My condition remains undefined."

Amarantha ends her slow advance a yard away from Tamlin. She faces him like a puma sizing up a kill, silent. Of course she would make him speak first. 

"Pray tell, Amarantha," Tamlin says after another tense moment, anger shivering under the surface of his voice, "what must our people further sacrifice on top of the sense of security they already eschew to live in the realm that currently surrounds us? What more could warrant the promise of _peace_?"

Amarantha chuckles prettily to herself and reaches out for Tamlin's hand, but he takes a sharp step back and squares his shoulder tensely. If Amarantha's confidence falters, she doesn't let it show through her face. "I would simply have you as my consort. Live here with me Under the Mountain, take my hand and my bed, and usher this land into prosperity at my side."

The silent intake of shocked breath caught in the lungs of every courtier eddies around us, unvoiced but felt, as Amarantha's words lay themselves bare like that. Even to me, the one who has burnt so many letters proposing the exact same arrangement, the life of them in the air feels like a sharp slap to the senses. A few offended murmurs build like tiny, lapping waves at the edge of the crowd. Andras shifts slightly against me to rest his hand on the pommel of his left-side sword without looking away from Tamlin. 

"Consort?" Tamlin repeats, and I curse the blight of distance that doesn't let me see the quality of the glint in his eyes when he says it. He keeps his body trained in a mask of calmness, but flashes of something blackened are roiling beneath it in my sensory vision. Amarantha steps forward again, reaches out to touch his shoulder, but Tamlin flinches away as if she stinks with plague. Even from here, I can see Amarantha's expression falter this time.

"Don't you dare touch me. You carved out my emissary's eye," Tamlin hisses, and my heart stutters as several other ambassadors gasp and whirl to look at me with horror staining their faces. Bitterness coils around my stomach like shackles. "You mangled my friend, and for what? To send a message?" Tamlin's voice builds, and I see his magic rolling off of him like mist in a lagoon. The ambassador who had stood near Tamlin flees into the crowd as the gap on the floor around the smoldering exchange yawns open in avoidance. 

Amarantha draws breath to speak and Tamlin silences her with a snarl and a single step toward her. "I would sooner," he says, dangerously low but with such purpose that the entire hall of attendees can hear, "take a human to bed, sooner _marry_ a human, than let you ever touch me with your murderous fucking claws as long as I draw breath."

No gasps this time, but stunned and stonewalled silence. The chandeliers high above us could have crashed and splintered in catastrophic showers of crystal and we still would not have been able to look away from the stare-down of Tamlin and Amarantha. 

Amarantha's jaw is quivering with tension and rage when she lets out a diffusing titter that ends up as the sonic equivalent of a lightning flash before thunder. "Well surely I would be better than a stinking human girl—“

" _Would_ you?" Tamlin's circulation is all black now to my senses, crawling with livid fury apparent in the way he stands over her now. _Tamlin, don't do this, this is how it all started—_ "I'm loathe to believe you because if my memory serves correctly, even your own sister preferred the company of a human to yours! Isn't that right, Jurian?!" Tamlin gestures rudely to Amaratha's ring, and she recoils as if he’s bitten her hand. The hall erupts in a contentious yammer of outcry. I see poison flowing behind Amarantha's eyes and I want to shout to our entire Court to run, but I know as well as any that we're stuck here in this heaping fucking boulder like bleating lambs until Amarantha says so. Tamlin stands strong as an elm, arrogant as a predator who thinks it's watching his dinner die in front of him. Andras beats to me to the exclamation in a hushed, hurried voice at my ear. 

"If you feel me draw my swords, _run_. He's being a fool and I'm sworn to protect him, but you might be able to winnow out of here.”

"SILENCE IN MY HALL!" Amarantha shrieks, still staring at Tamlin and the hint of a victorious smile on his face. For the first time in a very long time, true anger at him latches onto the pit of my belly. The ball—no longer a ball anymore, no, this is liable to turn into some sort of public execution in one way or another—falls quiet again. Fear rings high on silent partials around us all. “A toast, then!” Amarantha’s wild voice rackets around the hall as our goblets suddenly fill to brimming with dark wine, flat-out materializing in hands that didn’t have them already, pouring themselves from the bottom up with a surge of old, charred magic I can feel buzzing at the roots of my teeth when it sweeps through the room. I see several courtiers jump back when the drink slops over the edges of their cups, staining finery and wrists alike. Amarantha keeps her stare trained on Tamlin.

“A toast to all the High Lords,” Amarantha continues to bark, her words void of any of the hostess’ warmth she had tried putting on earlier. Truly at the end of her rope now. “To each of them who are stubborn enough to hold their lands in an iron grip, and twice over for those with enough vanity in their shriveled balls to reject wise politics! _Hail!”_

Her arm goes up as if inviting an answering shout, but nobody calls out to answer. None of us _can_ call out to answer, as a strange impulse that I suspect is also invading the rest of the guests’ limbs forces me to bring my goblet to my lips. The wine inside smells like rotten plums. I try to cast it to the floor, dash it at my feet and draw my blade to cut off Amarantha’s hands, but I can’t do anything but tip back the foul drink with a guttural sound of protest.

For all the times I've had the wind knocked out of me in the sparring ring, nothing compares to the smack of emptiness and nameless loss that suddenly beats once through my entire body in a great, heaving rush. _Fuck_. The tannins of the drink are noisily bitter on my tongue, tasting heavily of regret and coercion. My right arm burns with the effort of trying to fling the goblet, seized and stilled with invisible power until I drop the heavy pewter harmlessly to the floor.

I stagger as every single other courtier in the hall does the same to varying degrees of intensity—more wine spilling down more fronts, more cups dropping with a clash throughout the crowd. Andras’ hand at my back steadies me—he’s only just barely stumbled, but as he lowers his own goblet from disbelieving lips we share a brief look of similar, pure terror in the bedlam of shocked curses and raised shouts.

I look back to Tamlin, and my stomach plummets when I see the glow of power that only seconds ago was coursing through the whole of his veins now relegated to a low pulse around his heart. I gasp raggedly, looking down at my own arms and seeing nothing, nothing but the golden hum of weakened light at my chest, _no, Mother no, this can’t be happening—_ I look up at the crowd, focusing in with my metal eye, and see dimmed power in every single faerie around me.

Except Amarantha.

When I look to her in the scrim of my vision, I have to immediately look away. She burns such bright, virile red that I can’t keep my eyes on her for longer than a moment. Amidst the screaming of dawning realization vibrating to a sickening height in the hall, I can only stare bereft at Tamlin. _How could you let this happen?_ He tries to retaliate with dawning horror taking over his features beneath his mask. His power doesn’t make it down past his fingertips.

“I’m in a generous mood,” Amarantha says, her voice booming like a firestorm and bringing several courtiers to their knees. “and so despite your gross offenses to your new queen and _all_ of Prythian, I will offer the Spring Court a bargain.”

Tamlin seethes as he tries again and again to hurl lashes of power at her that fall short each time. “Save it, you fucking traitorous—”

“Tamlin, STOP!” I can’t hold back anymore, and I burst forward from my place in the crowd. Andras desperately tries to hold onto me, but I pull from his grip despite the pain it chimes through my bones and the terror I feel down to my toes. Amarantha rounds on me slowly, her face full of oily pride. My throat tightens, every limb is shaking, but I bid myself to stand tall in front of the chaos. “Let us hear the bargain,” I demand with all the strength I can muster. Amarantha smirks at me with smoldering victory. By all logical counts and the unholy scrape of Hybern magic, she’s won. She knows it. I can hardly stand to look at her as she turns to address the hall in full.

“I can break this spell on the realm—yes, the _entire_ realm—“ Several loud bawls go up amid the hysteria at the confirmation that it isn’t just Tamlin’s poor citizens gutted by her trick. “I will only break it if Tamlin agrees to join me here in my halls, or si—“

“ _Never_ ,” Tamlin roars, and I barely avoid glaring at him. Amarantha only laughs richly to herself.

“So selfish! _Or_ , as I was saying, since you’re so ready to stick it up a human girl’s cunt, simply find one who’s willing to marry you and tell you she loves you.” Amarantha turns back to Tamlin, surveying him with easy, feline boredom now that the magic has begun to settle in her veins like cooling molten gold. “But she has to be _interesting_ , you see. She must have a heart of ice to match your own, Tamlin. It will only work if she’s willing to kill a faerie—one of yours, unprovoked, just like Jurian did to my _sister_.” A small shockwave of raw power bursts out of her at that, and I have to barrel through a wave of nausea as it passes over me.

“If she can do that and still have the gall to truly love you, then you’ll understand my pain, _my Lord._ Then I’ll lift your spell. You have seven times seven years.” Amarantha shrugs passively, as if somebody has asked her why she’s chosen to wear that particular gown tonight. “It seems as fine a deadline as any. And another thing…”

Amarantha steps up to Tamlin, smacks away his hand with a hiss when he tries to catch her by the arm to hold her off. The wince that skates across Tamlin’s face for the briefest moment is all the tell I need to know that the block hurt. A _lot._ Amarantha reaches up and touches the corner of Tamlin’s mask, as though she’s adjusting it, and smiles contentedly to herself when all she receives from Tamlin is a stoney, condemning glare.

“Since those humans are all so devastatingly distracted by beauty, I wouldn’t want you to have an unfair advantage,” she says with cloying sweetness. Tamlin’s eyes widen and his nostrils flare with recognition only a split second before my own dawning horror. _Cauldron cracked, she couldn’t have—_

“Oh, don’t even try,” Amarantha calls over her shoulder to one of the guards who has reached up to try and remove his own mask. The darkness dancing in her eyes is toxic, swirling ambergris as she singles out the Spring Court, _my_ Court, my people, with a low chuckle. “ _Your_ masks stay on.”


	8. Familiar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We took a walk to the summit at night, you and I  
> To burn a hole in the old grip of the familiar, you and I;  
> And the dark was opening wide, do or die  
> Under a mask of a million ruling eyes..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

Twenty years.

I watch twenty years pass in a steady crawl of dereliction, and it rips me apart like a splintered flaying knife.

Tamlin doesn’t send anyone past the wall initially, intent on finding a way around the wording of the bargain without bloodshed. He barely leaves his study at all throughout the day, poring over old copies of treaties torn down from his shelves and sprawled in hapless layers over his desk like an autopsy of history in paper. He finds nothing.

I’m thrown into a whirlwind ten years of summons and summits across the realm, all from which the Night Court is bitterly and evidently absent. Good. Fuck them. It only takes two years to stop cringing and seething at the way the other ambassadors look at my permanent fox’s eyes with relief poorly veiled by attempts at empathy.

Amarantha and her fresh trove of our collectively seized power becomes the central issue of Prythian. I suppose, in her own twisted and rancorous way, that she _has_ forced us into a sort of collective peace—we’re all working as one at the underbelly of our outward dealings to topple her to the ground. Of course there are defectors. Of course there are cowards. But almost every Court is willing to allocate at least a measure of their ranks to helping us all unravel this maddening web of catastrophe.

The Spring Court was given forty-nine years to fix this. Unless Tamlin breaks and resorts to fratricide, we have just barely three decades left.

Tamlin has become colder as the weight of impossible decisions has worn on him. We’ve lost just over half of our courtiers, fleeing to other Courts and claiming their own Sanctuary for fear that Amarantha has knit some kind of subscript into her bargain and will strike the Spring Court down to rubble before the proper time has passed. A part of me can’t blame them, the old part of me that fled Autumn so readily almost four centuries ago. Had I not been granted the ability to renew myself here, the time it took to turn into the Lucien who thinks first rather than striking first, I might have gone with them.

But Tamlin needs me. He isn’t as rational as he used to be, and I fear he might buckle too soon without my reassurance. I’ve had to fill several roles that an Emissary at any other Court would forgo—patrolling, extra combat training, even a touch of espionage tactics. It rankled me at first, but whenever I would see the mounting exhaustion in Andras’ eyes that comes from being spread far too thin, I was spurred to shoulder more and more.

Tonight, I return exhausted from a long ride along the border after an even longer day filled with meetings. I groom the huffing horse myself—our stable groom left five months ago, off to hide out with a cousin in Winter Court—and take an extra moment to feed her a small, knobby apple I had picked idly on the grounds that morning. She whuffs at me softly, and I wonder if she can understand the shifting unease in everything around her. I’ve always let my heart bleed for innocent creatures.

Coming back around to the front of the manor to climb the steps home, intent on finding Andras and sharing a deep drink as soon as possible, I see one of the younger guards making his way down the outside stairs alone. I raise a hand in greeting, and he only nods. His eyes are clouded with something like distraction, and I try to offer him a small smile as consolation. He attempts to return it, but ultimately fails as we pass halfway up the marble steps. I understand, treating the curse with small doses of optimism don’t work for everybody. It suits me to distract myself and—

I freeze and my blood goes to jelly as the pieces click into place. With border patrol finished, _my_ border patrol, there should be no reason for a guard to be heading due south.

Toward the wall.

“ _Tamlin!”_ I barrel the rest of the way up the stairs, crashing into the foyer and tearing up to the second floor study. When I burst through the closed door, shocking Tamlin out of a stoney silence as he regards a heap of letters on his desk, an unseeing green stare, my hands are shaking.

“Call him back,” I demand, glad for once that my power is stunted and I can’t accidentally scorch the carpet beneath my feet in my fury. “Call that guard back from the wall _now_.”

“We have to start acting, Lucien,” Tamlin says, his voice commanding but still crusted with struggle. _Good. Let him feel all the regret in the world for putting us through this._

“There are other ways to retaliate!” I shout, my face twisting with desperation as Tamlin stands up with a stricken frown.

“And how do we do that without forces? Without power? We’ve been cursed within an inch of our fucking lives. I’ve been searching for _years_ , there is no other way out of this!” He hisses.

“We have an entire phalanx of changeling guards! They could rip her hall to shreds!”

Tamlin is quiet for a meaningful heartbeat, and I feel a wash of illness ripe with dread. “They’re the ones who have volunteered, Lucien. I met with the ranks two hours ago. This is our only option.”

“You fucking coward,” I spit, my cheeks burning with emotion beneath my mask like hot tar. “You utter, fucking coward.”

“Insubordination,” Tamlin snarls, but he doesn’t move from his spot. I see his heart hammering silver, the aura of his magic fighting its limits but falling so, so short of where it once was.

“Don’t—” I stop to swallow thickly around a fist of emotion in my throat when my voice catches. I meet Tamlin’s eyes and want to disappear as I beg. “Please let Andras stay until there isn’t anyone else.”

Tamlin regards me evenly across the study. When did he age so quickly, those little lines at his eyes and the tired droop to his shoulders? I never want to rule over anything as long as I live. I have only ever wanted deliverance from the utter disaster of Fate.

“If he volunteers, I have to let him go,” Tamlin says evenly.

“He’s your _right hand_ , Tamlin. Hold him off until there isn’t anyone left.” My words come out like broken glass.

“I can’t promise that.”

"Please, Tamlin," I plead, my voice breaking with rage as I refuse to look him in the eye, "I've lost—everything. Andras is the only one I have left."

"And I have _nobody_ ," Tamlin says in a low voice. "What you two share doesn’t excuse him from duty to his Court if that’s what it comes down to."

His words are harsher than he knows. I clench my teeth and look up at him, but I see bristled sadness where I expect to see malice.

"Tell him you need to keep him on to lead the ranks," I say, feeling the panic in my words mounting harrowingly.

" _Lie_ to my commander?"

"Perhaps I never lost the part of me that lies, Tamlin!" I suddenly shout, the emotions in me red-hot where my magic would have been twenty years ago. "My blood is bound to Beron's deceit, surely, so this is the only way I know to handle this! If Andras goes over the wall and doesn't come back, and Amarantha's knit some kind of fucking loophole into this bargain and _still_ takes you, I'll have whatever sordid existence she lets us keep here to spend alone, in mourning for _two_ people I wasn't able to save!" I advance on him like a snake to a beast, too panicked and enraged to understand my disadvantage. "Keep him back until the very. Last. Rank. I don't think I could willingly serve you any longer if it's your folly that kills him."

I see Tamlin's eyes flash with something like fury, but he smothers it when he turns to the east window and shakes his head. "You have a limited understanding of what it is to rule—“

"Then it's really fucking convenient I ran away from my chance at lording, isn't it?" I snarl, turning on my heel and storming from the study before giving Tamlin a chance to bite back. Yes, just like the adder snatching his strike at the heels of a bigger, stronger creature; slithering back to the dark to sulk and clean his fangs for the next day. I feel my pulse run cold and bitter. It’s clear that after nearly four hundred years, I still haven't gotten nearly as much Autumn out of my system as I had thought. 

When I immediately seek the haven of Andras' warmth, I don't find him in the barracks. A destructive hiss at the base of my skull scrapes at my bones with the fear that he's already gone, already assumed the martyr's mantle for his withering Court, and my legs nearly give out with relief when I find him sitting quietly in a tucked-away corner of the north garden. He hears me coming before I think to call out, and he says nothing until I sit beside him. 

"Dorian," he says clearly, his hands clenched into a knot of fingers between his legs where his elbows rest, tense, on his knees. I put a hand to his shoulder as an invitation to pour out to me. "The first one went through the wall today. His name was Dorian."

"I'm sure he was proud to stand up for his Court," I say softly, my voice coming out weaker than I intended it. 

"He said as much, but I could see the fear in his eyes. We all could," Andras replies, and with pained sympathy I see his fingers clench like a straining ward against grief. His breath catches and his voice falls to a broken whisper; "This is madness, Lucien."

"I know." All I can think to say, the lame patch overtop of a gaping hole left by loss that I know too well and Andras will have to feel over and over again. 

"I have to watch my soldiers go across to die without being able to tell them for certain that their sacrifice will even fix this," Andras continues emptily, and I watch his throat work around the words with the effort of composure. "I can't tell them what to expect. The mortal realm I used to know is _gone_. They're going into a foreign wasteland while I stay back and—“

"The others need you here to lead them, Andras," I breathe, barely finding the words as I feel the world falling out from under me with his suggestion that he would go. My knuckles go white on the edge of his bandolier. Neither of us notices through our separate fogs. 

"But what sort of a leader am I, only—just watching it happen from here? I always thought I could face death laughing. Cauldron knows I've been up against odds bad enough before. I don't know what to do." My heart breaks as I see a teardrop plummet into the dirt at our feet. We share a thick silence, balmy and clogged with too many emotions at once, before I let myself crack open my insides and give Andras everything left of myself that I have. 

"There's strength in grief," I murmur, feeling my mother's aspect rise up in me for the first time in far too long. "You can guide them through the bitterness and the pain, rework it into determination, forge a new link in your brotherhood. You're the finest leader in this entire damned Court, Andras." I let the last statement ring with the truth of my anger at Tamlin. Another pause lays over us like dark, rumpled sheets. 

“It—will be very hard to lose them," Andras whispers, reaching across us to take my hand in his. He kisses my palm fervently, and I feel shuddering sadness in me when I touch tears on his lips.

"It would be very hard to lose _you_." I allow myself the single moment of selfishness, if only to reassure Andras of his primacy. His shoulders leap with a held-in sob, and as I gather him into an embrace I see in me the inevitable end of the beauty that we've forged—bright and glorious amid the disrepair in my heart—looming ahead of my mind in the distance like the hulk of the wall itself. 

I hold him ever tighter, and in the silence of the whispering hedges we weep together for the first and last time.


	9. It's Happening Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I swear it is true,  
> The past isn’t dead;  
> It’s alive, it is happening  
> In the back of my head.
> 
> No future, no past,  
> No laws of time  
> Can undo what is happening  
> When I close my eyes.  
> And with the stars and the moon,  
> I woke up in the night  
> In the same place  
> To save me for my eyes..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

My heart is a raw, over-sutured wound, and the night that Andras decides he must go is when it shatters beyond any imaginable repair. 

We have less than a year to solve this catastrophe before Amarantha makes good on her deadline. There are twelve guardsmen left. We have twelve more chances, so I have little more than a month with Andras left before he takes it upon himself. Many of the previous sentinels have returned on their own after a day or two, only to continue trying to find the ice-hearted human girl with the blindness of loyalty until the day they don’t come back. I suspect more often than not it’s hunters who kill them, men, desperate for food as winter pulls closer south of our border. Men who have doubtless been killed in retaliation before their blighted ash weapons work their staunching poison on my friends.

Tamlin goes through the wall himself whenever a soldier’s foray stretches longer than three days to see if there might be a girl to retrieve. The relief inherent in seeing a guard return alive is always colored with a tiny, depthless ulcer of despair that the ranging didn’t work. Conversely, when Tamlin returns with a dead body for the new southern graveyard we’ve had to dig for his ranks, it feels like the sky grows blacker each time. There is so much death within this Court now. I’m surprised the flowers still choose to bloom.

Tonight Andras comes into my quarters well after dark, winter sitting heavily in these shortened cycles of the sun. I can tell something is very off as I set aside my book and see, with gutting suddenness, the tender pain in his stare.

"I love you, Lucien," he says softly in opening as he sits at the edge of my mattress, limned with the light from my single bedside candle. The phrase has become ours over the arcing stretch of time we’ve had together. I know how it sounds in every possible facet of his voice, but I realize now I've never heard it covered in gentle anguish. My guts turn to lead. Andras is beautiful. Andras is so perfectly, wholly beautiful as he reaches for me and clasps our fingers together. "You are worth every single moment you've ever given me."

"I would fall in love with you over and over again," I find myself saying, barely above a whisper that feels like a shout in the heart-rending quiet between us. A barreling surety like the rising tide begins to smolder deep between my lungs. 

"Promise me you won't ever lose your strength," Andras murmurs. I nod, mute, swallowing hard until I can find my voice. 

"Why does this feel like you're saying goodbye?"

"It's my turn, Lucien. Tomorrow, at midday."

I shake my head uselessly, relieved at my core to feel not the burn of tears but the frisson of fear. "But there are still twelve left," I insist, "there are still twelve other guards."

"Three of them have more than enough training to take my rank," Andras murmurs, sitting closer to me but not coddling me with indulgent touch. "I need to leave behind enough of a backbone for a new guard to be built once the Court is freed."

"We don’t—we won't need a backbone, we'll all get our power back, and—“

"They need to stay, Lucien. I trust them." His voice is soft, and I know I'm being childish. I hate that I'm practically begging, but there is so little left that matters anymore and I can't just let him go without at least trying to keep him here, to keep myself together. I draw deep, raw breaths, staring down at our entwined hands like the ivy at the manor entrance. 

“You might still come back though.” My voice is foreign, insistent. I can tell neither of us believes it. _A commander won’t stop until he succeeds, wholly._ I kiss Andras’ knuckles desperately and hold his hand to my chest. "What do I do without you?" I rasp, the words burning my throat like poison. I draw breath to put shape to my despair, somehow tell Andras again, over and over, how lost I would be without him. But he seems to feel my underlying unwillingness to pile guilt on him, and he wraps his arms around me in a tight embrace fraught with meaning. I cling back as though he's the only beacon in the realm. He _is_ the only beacon. 

"Are you afraid?" I finally whisper, long after our heartbeats have synched and I could recreate the pattern of his scent from memory at every angle imaginable. 

"Yes," he says carefully. I pull back from our hold and take a long look at him. There will never again be a more perfect and formidable warrior in Prythian, no one more humble in their prowess but so fearsome with innate strength that it emanates from them like an aura. Even the obsidian wolf mask, stuck across such a cunning, lovely face, complements his talents. The candlelight flickers off of its darkling edges, and I reach up to stroke the height of his jaw with my thumb. We aren't weeping this time, just beholding. Memorizing. He smiles at me; sad, but distantly proud. 

"What?" I ask him gently, my own attempt at anything that isn't a frown twitching at my lips. 

"The Wolf of the Southern Rim is afraid of something," he says through a short dry chuckle. His eyes shimmer as he stares at me, sees through me to the basalt of my core and ignites it, permanently, to keep me from ever extinguishing again. "Although this isn't the first time. When I saw you fight, on the steps when you first arrived—you _terrified_ me."

I lean forward to catch him in a kiss, deep and slow and purposeful, knowing full well this is the last time we can ever do this in the shroud of night with blessed silence cradling us both. Andras isn't my mate; I've known in my depths for several years now in the middle of this hecticism of fraught existence that he isn't my mate, but I love him all the same with every minute of the lonely eternity laid out before me.

I can't let him go if he doesn't know that in every language we've used to speak to one another through the centuries.

Andras' belt is off and on the ground half a second before he pushes my sleeping shirt over my head and works at the loose tie on my trousers with one hand, the other gripping immediately into my hair. He loves my hair. I will never cut my hair again. 

"You are the most wonderful, noble creature I've ever known," Andras murmurs, kissing me deeply at the hollow of my throat. "You are worth thousands of years of happiness, until every single breath of life has left every forest in the entire fucking realm."

I arch into his body as Andras curls over me possessively, craving his stolid warmth more than anything I've ever wanted in the last four-hundred years. He is the only thing that matters. He has so little time left, less than a full day—the thought should make me break down crying, but in this moment all I want is to feel him painted across my body in breath and teeth and skin. 

Andras meets my mouth with a languid kiss in punctuation, invitation, a bid to let him exist in ecstasy for these our final hours. I accept him with an open mouth, my hands on his hips, up the back of his shirt, shedding it like a wilting lily to feel the heat of his heartbeat against mine. 

It isn't fair. It isn't fair that somebody so warm and strong and unabashedly joyful should have to sacrifice himself. It should be _me_. But the guards are much more likely to find the girl, able to take woodland shapes instead of just stunning and frightening humans as High Fae—I quiet my racing thoughts by biting down on Andras' earlobe with a soft sound of encouragement. 

"You always made me proud," Andras breathes against my shoulder. "Your growth and your light, and your utter social genius—“ Andras lets a groan leap out between us when I wrap my legs around him and plant an open-mouthed kiss to the intricate tattoo on his neck. I can hardly handle his truths for me, spilling from him like a flood. My heart is liable to burst with affection and pain all at once. 

We dissolve into a twist of kisses, whispers, gentle encouragement and pliant bends. Our clothing is forgotten in quiet mayhem on my floor, our effort of pleasure and ardor hushed around us like an oath. We've never been loud, both thrilled by keeping the tiny cosmos of shared ecstasy reined within the haven of whatever space is left between our bodies as we revel in it.

Andras draws us out for a long, long time now, commanding and tender all at once— _my love, my love, ever my love—_ until looking down at him, at the adoration in his eyes, my panting breaks on the peak of a soft plea; I spill over my own edges in a loosed coil of warmth like a triggered snare, crying out hoarse into Andras' sweat-slicked shoulder as I stretch forward against him with the length of release. Andras follows close behind with my name on his lips, his core twitching richly below me.

We remain against each other for several moments, Andras stroking my thigh slowly where his arm rests by it and myself with my face still bowed against his shoulder. His pulse steadies next to my ear, so bright and strong that I can hardly fathom the reality of it slowing to a stop before the next sunset. 

"I will never forget you," I whisper, my lips brushing the salt of his cooling skin. Wordlessly, his arms wend up to wrap me closer to him. Soon we'll clean up, snuff the candle, and sleep beside each other for the last time, but for another bundle of sacred heartbeats, we remain entwined. Unfaltering. Existing. 

—

Andras wakes before me. I suppose something about dawning mortality makes it difficult to sleep in. 

He's left the shades drawn, so when my eyes flutter open I'm met with the silhouette of Andras sitting on the edge of the mattress facing the thin shafts of light filtering through the swaths of fabric. When I sit up, he turns to face me with a peaceful smile. We slept deeply through the night, his warm arm wrapped around my front like a ward against terror, the last thing I remember before dreamless dark took me. I wonder if Andras dreamt of afterlife. 

"Sleeping next to you was always my favorite," he says gently, and suddenly everything hits me at once through the sloughing off of drowsiness. The fear and bitterness of the past week give way to crashing, unavoidable sorrow. My right eye clouds over with terrifying, sudden tears. It's probably noon already. He needs a meal before he goes, he needs to be strong, he needs to be able to make a long journey on foot—

I suck in a shuddering breath as my damnable tears spill over, sliding down the rim of my mask and tracing my cheek in their descent. Andras leans to me, takes my face in his hands and kisses me through my weeping, gently, silent encouragement for me to be brave. I can only keep crying. 

"No tears if I don't come back," Andras says roughly. I nod, not able to make words through my jagged breathing. He hasn't even left yet. I tell myself I won't ever let myself be reduced to tears once Andras is gone, I will adopt his strength in the only way I know how beyond training in the arena until I drop. But for now, I can cry until my natural eye falls out as well. 

When he rises from the mattress, I can feel my soul cleaving in two. I force myself to stay my tears and meet his golden eyes with every drop of love left in me. 

"I want to see you again someday," he murmurs, outlined by the weak daylight behind him and ashine with quiet pride. "I want to see you without your mask, beside your mate, smiling like you did the first time I made you laugh." He swallows around emotion, steels it down, and tucks a fall of hair behind my ear. "I expect you to age very well."

I nod blindly, clasping his hand one last time, and he strokes the edge of my cheek beneath my mask with his thumb. Andras has always been full of faith where I've doubted. I decide in that moment that I could believe in a fragment of an afterlife just for him. "Promise me you won't cry if I don't return, but you _will_ be free, Lucien."

"Always," I say, the only word I can think to properly respond to everything he's given me. Andras kneels before me and kisses me for the last time, warm as a breeze and more precious than life. We say nothing more as he rises, leaves my room, and shuts the door softly behind him. He doesn't look over his shoulder at me, nor would I want him to—prolonging pain was never the way he did things. 

I stay sitting at the foot of the bed, wrapped in sheets that smell of Andras, his kiss still warm on my lips, and cry the final flow of tears that I ever want to let past my lashes in the Spring Court. 


	10. Citizen of Glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Rend a black drop from my heart  
> With the weight of days.  
> The end of time has just begun,  
> I hear it call your name.
> 
> And no straining of the string  
> Can reverse what will begin;  
> Some let go and some hold on,  
> There is no mistake.  
> If I could wash all ill away,  
> Tell me, would you stay?
> 
> And no lovers' sin  
> Can reverse what will begin."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A song-by-chapter playlist for Equinox is available at -  
> https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/16jUWIpNmkCD7KsR3xWZv5

There is nowhere to go but outward.

So outward I flee.

Tamlin has left to retrieve the human girl. We concocted, ten years ago, a story to spin her about the Treaty having a clause about killing faeries. Imprisonment. I've been skeptical about it since the beginning. Now, I don't particularly care. I just have a promise to keep.

I won't cry. 

I saw at the base of the sapling I've found at a far edge of the west woods. Springy, green, rare for this late in the season. Small for it, too. My dagger is rhythmic in its passes through the budding bark, and I try not to think about the life that I'm ending. One life to honor two—more than even. The only sound around me is the rustle of the forest. 

I won't. Cry. 

_Don't hurt her_ , I had demanded as I watched Tamlin become horns and fur and teeth and claws in the empty foyer the other day. He had fixed me with that dark, green stare, itching to bound across the wall and collect his prize. His project. His last, desperate hope. Anybody cunning enough to kill Andras deserves respect worthy of every Lord in Prythian, and regardless of whatever Tamlin had planned I was determined to see she was treated as such. I might hate her for the destiny of what she had done, for the coldness in her heart that would let her be the one, but I would never see her harmed for it. 

_That's the point, Lucien._ I had hated Tamlin in that moment more than ever. The exasperated patronizing in his growl made me want to set him aflame, and so I only turned and left him to bound down the manor steps and into the southern trees. I wouldn't see him for some time. I could safely cool my anger in the nothingness of a quiet Court until he came back and I could look into the eyes of the human girl with enough strength and hate to possibly free us.

The sapling cracks from the dirt at its sawed base and I pull it up, carrying it into a nearby clearing in which I've made a small pile of fallen leaves. None of the leaves are anything but green, but they'll burn all the same. They'll burn just like home, for this ancient rite that I've waited far too long to do for one soul and had hoped I would never need to for the other. I set my dagger to the body of the sapling and split it straight down the middle, pulling its edges apart to make two long, flexible whips of wood. I put one down beside me where I sit and begin weaving the other. 

I won't cry. 

Tamlin has changed over the last forty-eight years. He barely smiles. His patience is terrifyingly limited. His sense of compassion has been replaced with reckless protection over our Court, a dangerous amount of it. Despite our hamstrung magic, he still lashes out in lances of anger that have broken furniture, damaged walls, and left more than a few of our straggling courtiers stricken with fear or embarrassment in front of him. There are disappointingly few glimmers of the resplendent ruler I watched at my first Nynsar so many years ago. Gone is the statuesque High Lord in gold from the masquerade Under the Mountain before our realm was cursed. It's as if Tamlin is slowly being taken over by the beast in his veins, letting his heart honestly and truly be the stone of its own making. 

The first half of the sapling sits in my hands now in a tightly-woven, intricate crown. I turn my dagger upside down in my hand, touch its point to one of the flat curves of branch on its outside, and carefully carve a name that shows the lively green in its core through the outside that I scrape away: _jesminda_

I place the crown gently on the pile of leaves and take up the second half of the sapling. This one takes a bit more time, a bit more fresh grief leaving me to fill its shape. I imagine the light playing across the silken, black hair over which it would sit. I imagine the hyacinths he might tuck into its braided gaps before placing it on his own head with a bright, depthless laugh. When I carve into this second rudimentary circlet, my hand shakes slightly: _andras_

I won't cry. 

I place this crown of branches next to the other one, adjusting them to sit evenly in the center of their bed of leaves. I remove the little flask from my pocket, pour a measure of wheat liquor over them, and tip the rest of it back in a heavy sip that leaves my tongue burning. 

"To you," I say, staring at the vignette of the two crowns atop vivid green leaves in the center of this still clearing like a boneyard. I dredge up a fist of my power from the center of my heart, knotted and resistant for its long time of dormancy, wincing as I concentrate on dragging it to the tips of my fingers. When I feel enough of it welled in my palm I let it loose in a short blast of effort, and my spirit is emboldened for a hair-raising moment—a blink of the strength I once had—as a peal of flames leaps from my hand to land on the pile in front of me like a cat to a cushion. 

The greenery takes immediately with the help of the liquor. The leaves fizzle and crack, letting off plumes of sweet smoke before truly igniting for the springy fortitude left in their seams. As the flames rise on the tiny pyre, filling the scent of the forest with the old ashen blood of where once was home, I sit before it to stand vigil with the ones I loved. 

"I'm...furious," I say awkwardly after a couple seconds, wanting to fill the silence and loose my grief at the same time and not knowing what do besides unload, "at nothing in particular that I never got to see either of you age with me."

It feels strange, this talking to nobody out loud. I know I must do this though, that I will choke with tension five years down the road if I don't get this all out now. 

"I don’t—I haven't got remains to burn. I don't want you to linger here. I hope the weavings work." I lick my lips, clenching and unclenching my hands where they rest on my knees. "Jesminda, I'm sorry it took me so long."

The wet crackle of the flames answers me, still hissing as it swallows the leaves slowly. The crowns remain untouched. I figure I have until they turn to ashes to pour out my insides, these frantic little effigies of the only two people I've ever loved, and then forever hold my peace. 

"I hope," I continue, "that they love flowers as much as both of you did. My mate. Someday. I want—I want a garden. You both made me realize, and then remember, how much I love caring for...things. Beautiful, lovely things. So much gentler at the core than I am." I bunch the fabric of my trousers in my right hand idly. "Even though I tend to bristle. I promise, for both of you, I'll let the right one in. So please be patient with me if it takes a while to find them. I'll be tender, Jesminda. And Andras, I'll be free. Just...give me time."

The flames lick up to the woven branches and catch, my breath catching along with them. It spreads slowly; I still have time. I can still take some time to truly say my goodbyes. 

"There will always be a part of my heart that's...broken and sodden, and too dead to feel properly, but were it not for both of you that would—it would be my entire heart. You were both proof of the light I needed so badly, the truth amidst all this...crumbling." I stare at the shapes the fire makes around the crowns, dancing like an intimate little flicker of recognition around each of them. "You both made me into a male worth loving. And my mate will have your memories to thank for that. I—of course I'll keep working on it. As best I can. Every day."

The woven branches are smoldering now, havens of flame in the center of the wider inferno of their leafy bed. The smell of it is like sweetened nighttime. Departure. I clench my jaw to fend off a sudden, clutching wave of emotion. I won't cry. 

"I want to see you both when I die, whether I'm killed in all this mounting chaos or am lucky enough to choose when I pass when I get old enough. I want to see you standing together, with a garden you've tended. And open arms ready to welcome me alone, or beside whomever comes with me." My voice breaks as the fire pops, and each effigy is halfway ash now. "I will greet you again as one I hope you would still be glad to call yours. Because I will always, eternally, belong to both of you."

Flames lick quickly along the length of Jesminda's crown, followed soon by a slow crawl around the braided branch for Andras. My breath sticks in my lungs like thorns. I fight to draw deep breath. 

"When I bond," I murmur finally, fiercely, "I hope the first thing they feel in me is the depth of love I received from you. I hope they embrace it. And I hope they understand someday how much they owe to your memory for who I am today and every day forward."

My last words now spoken to the smoking pyre of my bidden vigil, I sit as quiet sentinel to watch it all burn down to ash. Several times I have to swallow the threat of tears, but I refuse to break the final oath I was ever able to make to Andras. 

I won't cry. 

When the last of the leaves is reduced to pale grey, embers glowing faintly like winking eyes, I allow myself to stand. I stare at the ground, not quite knowing what to do. I turn to the west, intending to go deeper into the forest and just keep walking with my static, silent mind for company until the sun sets all the way.

But the sound of the gate back at the manor singing open stills my limbs, and my heart as well for a split second. I smell the musky remnants of the forest beyond the wall, twinned on two bodies. Unconsciously, my pulse quickens.

The human girl is here.

 

_—end—_

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Glad to share how I've imagined our favorite golden-eyed fox fared before Feyre arrived :)


End file.
